Power law distribution: does it really characterize wiki communities?

2022-06-30

We could define peer production online communities as groups of individuals that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open-source projects. But, is participation by its members equal? The reality is that very few people carry out the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions.

The distribution of this sort of participation is usually defined by a power-law distribution. However, recent studies have questioned its suitability in this area. Ámbar Tenorio, Javier Arroyo, and Samer Hassan have conducted a study to critically examine the premise that the participation in wiki communities adheres to such distribution, based upon the evaluation of over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom.