Time-series Analyses of the Editors and Their Edits for Adding Bibliographic References on Wikipedia

Abstract

　We conducted a time-series analysis to clarify the sustainability for adding scholarly bibliographic references to English Wikipedia (enwiki). The results are summarized as follows: The characteristics of the trends between the edits in enwiki as a whole and the adding the references are different in the point that the latter keeps a certain scale at recent years. The number of editors adding the references has seasonal growth trends in April and November every year since 2011. The majority of new editors for adding the references contribute for single month only, but the scale of the editors remains flat in recent years. These characteristics in the editors adding the references seem to be affected by the participants of Wiki Education, so adding the references would be sustainable as long as these activities continue.