The Effect of Primary Authorship on Wikipedia Article Quality

In this paper, we examine the connection between article quality, and “primary authorship ” on Wikipedia articles. An editor is said to be a primary author of an article if he or she has made a signif-icant percent of the total edits to that article. Given a set of edits to an article, we define a concentration function that can quantify the concentration of these edits, in effect measuring the level of primary authorship for an article. We then apply this concentration function to the featured articles, considered to be the best articles on the site, and a random sample of non-featured articles. The comparison demonstrates a substan-tial correlation between the degree of primary authorship (i.e., con-centration of edits), and the quality of the article. We also apply the concentration function to all recent featured article nominations, comparing successful and unsuccessful ones. Our results indicate that successful featured article candidates will be ones with a higher concentration. 1