294 | nº 31, pp. 283-302 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
Spanish/Castilian on Wikipedia: voices and discussion forum
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
Number of edits made by the 10 most active editors (identified + bots)
134
77
3,117
568
Percentage of edits made by the 10 most active users out of all edits
20.46%
35.98%
25.05%
29.35%
Number of watchers
90
90
546
546
Percentage of watchers compared to editors (general)
3.76%
1.16%
6.62%
1.09%
Protection against novice editors or IPs
no
no
no
no
Number of visits to the page
Over the last year
63,509
127
1,328,800
1,904
Over the last 60 days
22,557
34
235,096
238
Source: compiled by the author using ToolForge
When analyzing a Wikipedia article, it is important to understand the how it has been constructed. The page, “Spanish language” has been produced by 3,612 users over 17 years. Of these users, 1,156 were editors identifiable by usernames, while 2,357 were anonymous users or unidentified editors (IPs). As can be seen, this adds up to an immense amount of activity. The article has also been improved automatically by 99 bots, that have corrected minor issues (errata or formatting).
We found that each editor who has worked on the article made, on average 3.44 edits which constitutes a mean number of additions equivalent to 726.26 bytes. These data are purely statistical, involving arithmetic means, and do not therefore give a true reflection of the plurality of the article’s voice. Instead, in order to measure the impact made by an article’s creation it is best to evaluate the weight of the ten editors who have contributed most to the article in question. In the case of the article “Spanish language”, the participation of the most active editors only accounts for 25.05% of the article’s total content; this is because we are dealing with an article that has been created pluralistically and without any monopolizing control. The data on “Controversy” are similar although they do not reach the same levels as those recorded for the “Spanish language”.
A piece of data of great importance concerns the fact that the discussion pages associated with both articles studied are significant in terms of size (measured in bytes) and the participation of numerous voices, indeed, there are even more sections in the discussions than in the articles themselves. This appears to confirm that debate surrounding the Spanish language is one of the most important topics in Spanish Wikipedia.
In this way, quantitative analysis corroborates our initial hypothesis. The volume of activity surrounding the construction of the pages we have selected clearly demonstrates the collaborative nature of work on the encyclopedia.
Regarding quantitative analysis of the size of the articles studied, the indices of “apparent quality” (high number of in-text references, but above all, the quality of these references) and the volume of users involved are all important elements
