A clustering approach to infer Wikipedia contributors' profile

Abstract

Recent studies have improved our knowledge about the different types or profiles of online contributors, from casual to very involved ones, through focused people. But they use very complex methodologies, making their replication by the practitioners limited. We show on both Romanian and Danish wikis that using only the edit and their distribution over time to feed clustering techniques, allows to build these profiles with good accuracy and stability. This suggests that light monitoring of newcomers may be sufficient to adapt the interaction with them and to increase the retention rate.