The intent of the third hypothesis was to recognize patterns of a typical lifecycle of a Wikinews user. Because – from a psychological perspective – the inhibition threshold is higher for each step (commenting, editing, writing new articles), intuitively we expected that a typical user would first join the network as a reader, then become a commentator and later on evolve to an editor or even writer of new articles.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to check for the existence of the first step in this suspected lifecycle, because our data only included users that already were editors. Due to the data source, mere reading of articles could not be included in our datasets.

Moreover, with our datasets, we were not able to develop any approach that would allow us to conduct an aggregated analysis based on all users. Instead, in order to see if users to whom the suspected lifecycle pattern applies exist at all, we selected several individual users for analysis. For each of these users we looked at the Contribution Index and how it changed over time.

When using DataSet2, the Contribution Index should reflect whether a user mainly edits articles or mainly creates new articles. A user who only edits articles would appear at top of the Index, while a user who only creates articles would be at the bottom. The user’s position on the x-axis in addition indicates the amount of contributions.

Observing the change in position in the Contribution Index aimed at finding the transition from editor to creator. In order to also find the transition from commentator to editor, we had to include the activity on the discussion pages into the analysis. Although, as stated earlier, the corresponding dataset was incomplete due to the many unstructured posts, we used it to generate a second Contribution Index which we viewed in parallel with the first one. In this second index, however, we did not focus on the vertical position of the user but on the general activity. For this analysis we believed the Discussion dataset to be accurate enough.

Summarizing our approach, we expected to find the following pattern if our hypotheses was correct: A new user should appear in the Contribution Index of the Discussion Dataset first. After that, he or she should enter the Contribution Index of Dataset2 from the top and then move slowly towards the bottom right corner. In doing so the user will not necessarily reach the bottom, as this would indicate that he or she only creates new articles but does not edit anymore at all.

However, the results were not at all as expected. Appearance and movement of users in the two Contribution Indices seemed to be random; no consistent pattern could be discovered. Obviously each individual user has to be characterized by his or her own specific approach to Wikinews. To our surprise, there are users who start with creating one or more articles and only later on edit other user’s work. And while some users follow the suspected pattern, there is no significant number of this type. There are for example also users who start with an almost balanced Contribution Index value and only slowly develop towards creating more articles.

Moreover, the activity on the discussion pages has no correlation with the writing or editing of articles.

Having looked at a large number of both article and discussion pages, we gained the impression that there are two fundamentally different types of users: On the one hand there are those interested in the topics; they primarily write and edit articles. On the other hand there are users that act more like reviewers who criticize the article author’s writing style or question the journalistic value of an article on the discussion page. Although we cannot prove this observation, it is consistent with the results of our analysis, especially considering that some of the most central users in the Discussion Dataset were not central in the other two Datasets.