Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Αξιοπιστία της Βικιπαίδειας" in Greek language version.
Good samaritans with less than 100 edits made higher-quality contributions than those with registered accounts and equal amounts of content. In fact, anonymous contributors with a single edit had the highest quality of any group. But quality steadily declined, and more-frequent anonymous contributors were anything but Samaritans; their contributions generally didn't survive editing... The authors also recognize that contributions in the form of stubs on obscure topics might survive unaltered indefinitely, inflating the importance of single contributions...Objective ratings of quality are difficult, and it's hard to fault the authors for attempting to find an easily-measured proxy for it. In the absence of independent correlation, however, it's not clear that the measurement used actually works as a proxy. Combined with the concerns regarding anonymous contributor identity, there are enough problems with this study that the original question should probably be considered unanswered, regardless of how intuitively satisfying these results are.
We find that quality that is associated with contributor motivations ... Registered users' quality increases with more contributions ... Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous 'Good Samaritans' who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed "zealots" contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.
We find that quality that is associated with contributor motivations ... Registered users' quality increases with more contributions ... Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous 'Good Samaritans' who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed "zealots" contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.
