Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I recently read someone (but now I've lost the reference! [Found it, thanks to a commenter: It's Peter Morville.] ) talking about Wikipedia's long tail, by which the person meant (I think) the articles that are rarely read or edited. The question was whether the quality of those articles is as good as that of the oft-edited ones.

It's a great question. The obvious guess is that, if you believe the wisdom of crowds saves Wikipedia from inaccuracy and mediocrity, then long tail articles ought not to be as good as head of the tail articles. But I find little about Wikipedia conforms to my expectations. In conclusion: I have no guess.

Jimmy Wales has apparently said that research he did in December 2004 showed that about half the edits done by logged-in users are done by 2.5% of logged-in users. (Ironically, I'm having difficulty finding an authenticated source for this stat.) Do we know what the curve of traffic per article or edits per article looks like? (This should probably exclude stubs.) Is it a power law, as would be expected? If so, is there any way to check the quality (accuracy, relevance, completeness, neutrality?) of the long tail articles?

Just how good and/or useful is Wikipedia's long tail?