Review for Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie

This paper studies the balance and behaviors between user groups in Wikipedia, a collaborative web-based encyclopedia. These trends provide insight on how to effectively encourage the masses to continue contribution, while maintaining the core user base of elite, administrative members.

First off, your paper is not formatted correctly.

How did you get your hands on such data? A dump of 5 million pages, which included 58 million revisions? This is impressive in itself, let alone your finidngs.

I thought you covered both ends of your hypothesis quite well. Specifically, when an admin has to 'revert' a page due to vandalism or other factors, that is counted as a larger per-word edit than if they had just supplemented current content. It shows that you are not biased in your findings.

What is the motivation of these admins? Why do they persist as an elite culture? Is there a motivation that can be found in areas such as online gaming that would give clues as to how to entice further participation and user retention? You mention lifespan as a constraint as well as the start-up time needed as possible influences.

As stated earlier, your data is incredible. The deliniation between edits made by a bot and by an admin is an important one. Is there a relevance of user contributions made by spam bots as well? Missing reference found on page 3.

Why the spike in many graphs at the beginning of 2002? Publicity launch? Your reference to the 'growth of the low-edit users', the rise of the bourgeoisie... is this correctly appropriated? I would think that the admins are the 'upper class', the bourgeoisie, and the low-edit noobs are the proletariat. Just a thought.

Future directions really solidifies your work, in relating to the social stratification and conflict theory. Good to take it out of the tech perspective for the finish.