A quantitative approach to the use of the Wikipedia

This paper presents a quantitative study of the use of the Wikipedia system by its users (both readers and editors), with special focus on the identification of time and kind-of-use patterns, characterization of traffic and workload, and comparative analysis of different language editions. The basis of the study is the filtering and analysis of a large sample of the requests directed to the Wikimedia systems for six weeks, each in a month from November 2007 to April 2008. In particular, we have considered the twenty most frequently visited language editions of the Wikipedia, identifying for each access to any of them the corresponding namespace (sets of resources with uniform semantics), resource name (article names, for example) and action (editions, submissions, history reviews, save operations, etc.). The results found include the identification of weekly and daily patterns, and several correlations between several actions on the articles. In summary, the study shows an overall picture of how the most visited language editions of the Wikipedia are being accessed by their users.