A Lifecycle Analysis of the Revision Behavior of Featured Articles on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia. Its openness allows anyone to edit an article, making articles vary greatly in quality. As only a small proportion of articles are assessed manually, the automatic evaluation of quality has become a highly active research field. Among the factors that affect quality, revision action is the direct factor. In this paper, we conduct a lifecycle analysis of the revision action of featured articles-the best work on Wikipedia, to find out the revision behavior patterns. Using a fine-grained approach, we parse revision actions into insert, delete and replace actions to study their performance in different phases of the lifecycle. Our results reveal that featured articles have distinct revision behavior over different phases. The contribution of the research is to show the correlation between revision behavior and the evolution of quality, which can help us understand what is behind the evolution of articles and can be used to assist quality evaluation.