MIT economist Abhishek Nagaraj analyzed the effects of copyright law on Wikipedia, especially “how digitized, public domain works dramatically affect the quality of knowledge,” reports The Atlantic.
Nagaraj’s research used digitized versions of Baseball Digest to analyze how public domain pictures and information can change Wikipedia traffic. Google digitized the journal in 2008.
After the digitization, “Nagaraj found articles on four decades of All-Stars between 1944 and 1984 grew by about 5,200 words per article,” according to The Atlantic.
But Nagaraj’s true findings came not from the length increases of the articles, but from the traffic driven to the Web pages. Copyright laws allowed articles from 1944 to 1984 to be in the public domain, so authors could use images from these articles on Wikipedia.
The image availability caused the number of pictures on articles to rise to 1.15 per article. Players with articles still under copyright law only had .667 pictures per article, despite playing in a more modern era.
“Copyright law affects to some degree what information makes its way onto Wikipedia, but what it more strongly affects is how we use that information once it’s there. In other words, digitizing any knowledge increases an article’s text, but only digitizing public domain images makes articles more frequently updated and visited,” notes the article.
Google’s algorithm favors updated Web pages and images, so perhaps this helps explain the rise in traffic.
MIT economist Abhishek Nagaraj analyzed the effects of copyright law on Wikipedia, especially “how digitized, public domain works dramatically affect the quality of knowledge,” reports The Atlantic.
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