On the origin of burstiness in human behavior: The wikipedia edits case

Abstract

A number of human activities exhibit a bursty pattern, namely periods of very high activity that are followed by rest periods. Records of this process generate time series of events whose inter-event times follow a probability distribution that displays a fat tail. The grounds for such phenomenon are not yet clearly understood. In the present work we use the freely available Wikipedia's editing records to tackle this question by measuring the level of burstiness, as well as the memory effect of the editing tasks performed by different editors in different pages. Our main finding is that, even though the editing activity is conditioned by the circadian 24 hour cycle, the conditional probability of an activity of a given duration at a given time of the day is independent from the latter. This suggests that the human activity seems to be related to the high "cost" of starting an action as opposed to the much lower "cost" of continuing that action.