Without the 'spillover effects' of open content production, the growth in Wikipedia editing activity between 2002 and 2010 would have been halved. That is the central finding of research by Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Seiler, which analyses editing data by Wikipedia users to show how content...

Using detailed edit-level data over eight years across a large number of articles on Wikipedia, we find evidence for a positive spillover effect in editing activity. Cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current article length, lead to significantly more editing activity, while...