The dynamics of Wikipedia article revisions: an analysis of revision activities and patterns

To study the dynamics of revision activities of Wikipedia articles, we define 14 revision actions, annotate 6,950 revisions from 20 articles in four quality ranks (C, B, GA, and FA), and analyse revisions and revision actions in ten consecutive time periods. We identify four revision patterns: 1) revision actions at the sentence and link levels appear in similar paces; 2) the numbers of revision actions at sentence and link levels comparatively evenly grow with the article's age prior to the last time period; 3) the paces of media and reference-level actions tend to be lagged behind sentence and link-level actions; 4) before being promoted to the GA or FA rank, articles nominated to the GA or FA rank exhibit a significant rising pattern in amounts of revisions and revision actions. This pattern is validated with a larger set of 533 articles.