Lorenz, Gini, and Pareto
The Lorenz curve is a graphical representation of social inequality of some sort. For example, economists use it to display the income distribution for households. The Gini coefficient further condenses the Lorenz curve into a single measure. And last in line is the Pareto principle, sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule, which is a frequent observation of a certain distribution of of social inequality.
All of these well-known concepts easily apply to research on corporate and public wikis. A first shot is to plot the cummulative distribution of revisions against users to gain an insight into the inequality of work done in wikis. Of course, whether or not revisions are a good measure for work is arguable, not the least because the quality of revisions is a completely different issue.
At any rate, Jimmy Wales claims that the top 2% of all Wikipedians account for more than 80% of the work in total. Not so much Pareto, obviously. Still, his claim is rather well informed, as our below plot confirms.
What’s more interesting is that corporate wikis very well display the 80-20 rule. So there you go, another hint that corporate wikis don’t obey the laws of the public sphere where people come and go as they please. After all, membership in an organization more or less establishes a firm user base of corporate wikis, especially if there is no other means to and end. The silver bullet for making your wiki a success is thus to give your employees no other choice of media.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:22 am
sorry but i dont agree with the ‘137238′ users. These are afaik dead database-bodies of speedregistering.
If you want to compare ‘real’ wikipedians with enlisted, wage-getting, 9-5 engaged employees, you should decrease to the a number of editors withat least 20 edits or editors with ‘Stimmberechtigung’ ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stimmberechtigung )
Wikpedia says “Mehr als 7.000 Autoren arbeiten regelmäßig an der deutschsprachigen Ausgabe mit.” ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia )
July 7th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Yes, you’re right, 137.238 users are in the database, which obviously contains a lot of dead bodies. However, increasing the minimum number of edits to at least 20 still returns 27.485 users. Thus, the Gini coefficient is well above .9. I’ll see for some of your other suggestions later on. Thanks for your suggestion, I appreciate it.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
To make that clear: the number of 137238 users is not the number of users who registered but the number of users with at least one edit. And also in organizations we have users who registered (as they are forced to) but do not participate/refuse to use the wiki. So I think its feasible to compare the curves above the way we did.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
“So I think its feasible to compare the curves above the way we did.”
OK now I understand, You are right.
“And also in organizations we have users who registered (as they are forced to) but do not participate/refuse to use the wiki.”
Probably its the most important task to motivate Users, getting at least a wiki which is the ‘mother’ of all organizational information and communication.
July 12th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Motivating users is certainly among the most important things an organization (i.e., who ever is responsible or, better, feels responsible) can do to get its wiki going. Then again, there is only so much an organization can do. What we frequently observe in corporate wikis is that there is some inaugural period (a jump start, if you will) where only few people contribute to the wiki. We call these people the midwives as the bring the wiki into life. If an organizations fails to jump start the wiki (e.g., create curiosity and above all necessity), there is little left to do.
The wiki itself does not need to be the mother of all organizational information and communication, although in cases of smaller organizations that’s desirable. The magic word here is structural equivalence. That is to say, the purpose of the wiki has to fit a niche, there can be no competing and thus structural equivalent system. If this niche is to maintain information and communication, fine. We’ve seen cases where wikis serve a single purpose (e.g., software documentation) and integrate well with other information and communication systems (e.g., ticketing or project management systems). Wikis work flawlessly as long as they’re one of a kind. If a wiki is more or less a ‘nice-to-have’ kind of system, it’s almost bound to fail.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for that graph. Do you have any more info about the Lorenz curve? The wiki link really isn’t giving me enough info.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:54 am
What kinda information do you need? Wikipedia pretty much explains every technical detail about the Lorenz curve, don’t you think? And our own interpretation in terms of wiki usage in organizations is straight foward, too. But maybe I can be of more assistance …