Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap

Abstract

In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns. However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age. We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity patterns of Wikipedia.