Social networks of Wikipedia (original) (raw)

When the Wikipedians Talk: Network and Tree Structure of Wikipedia Discussion Pages

Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversations. An analysis of the tree structure of the article talk pages allows to capture patterns of interaction, and reveals structural differences among the discussions about articles from different semantic areas.

Wikipedia and its network of authors from a social network perspective

2012 Fourth International Conference on Communications and Electronics (ICCE), 2012

Online social networks (OSNs) become more and more important in today's social and business life. Therefore, considerable effort is put in research to gain a deeper knowledge of the development of these networks and their dynamics. However, most of the existing literature is based on very limited subsets of the network data, which is often filtered by the OSN operator providing the data or biased by the crawling mechanisms used to obtain the data. This makes it difficult to analyze the temporal evolution of OSNs based on complete data. To overcome this issue, we investigate the dynamics of the publicly available collaboration network of the Wikipedia authors as an example for an OSN-like network. In particular, we study the temporal evolution of this network since its beginning and demonstrate that it exhibits prominent similarities to well known social networks such as the small-world phenomenon. This indicates that the insights gained from the analysis of Wikipedia's collaboration network might be transferable to social networks in general.

Wikipedias as complex networks

arXiv (Cornell University), 2006

Wikipedia is a popular web-based encyclopedia edited freely and collaboratively by its users. In this paper we present an analysis of Wikipedias in several languages as complex networks. The hyperlinks pointing from one Wikipedia article to another are treated as directed links while the articles represent the nodes of the network. We show that many network characteristics are common to different language versions of Wikipedia, such as their degree distributions, growth, topology, reciprocity, clustering, assortativity, path lengths and triad significance profiles. These regularities, found in the ensemble of Wikipedias in different languages and of different sizes, point to the existence of a unique growth process. We also compare Wikipedias to other previously studied networks.

Wikipedias: Collaborative web-based encyclopedias as complex networks

Physical Review E, 2006

Wikipedia is a popular web-based encyclopedia edited freely and collaboratively by its users. In this paper we present an analysis of Wikipedias in several languages as complex networks. The hyperlinks pointing from one Wikipedia article to another are treated as directed links while the articles represent the nodes of the network. We show that many network characteristics are common to different language versions of Wikipedia, such as their degree distributions, growth, topology, reciprocity, clustering, assortativity, path lengths and triad significance profiles. These regularities, found in the ensemble of Wikipedias in different languages and of different sizes, point to the existence of a unique growth process. We also compare Wikipedias to other previously studied networks.

Network Analysis for Wikipedia

Network analysis is a quantitative methodology for studying properties related to connectivity and distances in graphs, with diverse applications like citation indexing and information retrieval on the Web. The hyperlinked structure of Wikipedia and the ongoing, incremental editing process behind it make it an interesting and unexplored target domain for network analysis techniques.

Network analysis of collaboration structure in Wikipedia

Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, 2009

In this paper we give models and algorithms to describe and analyze the collaboration among authors of Wikipedia from a network analytical perspective. The edit network encodes who interacts how with whom when editing an article; it significantly extends previous network models that code author communities in Wikipedia. Several characteristics summarizing some aspects of the organization process and allowing the analyst to identify certain types of authors can be obtained from the edit network. Moreover, we propose several indicators characterizing the global network structure and methods to visualize edit networks. It is shown that the structural network indicators are correlated with quality labels of the associated Wikipedia articles.

Ecology of the digital world of Wikipedia

Scientific Reports

Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors’ activity and the articles’ level of complexity. Using our metrics, one can better identify the human-labeled high-quality articles, e.g., “featured” ones, and differentiate them from the popular and controversial articles. Furthermore, the dynamics of the editor-article system is also well captured by the metrics, revealing the evolutionary pathways of articles and diverse roles of editors. We demonstrate that the collective effort of the editors indeed drives to the direction of article improvem...

Co-authorship 2.0 : Patterns of collaboration in Wikipedia

The study of collaboration patterns in wikis can help shed light on the process of content creation by online communities. To turn a wiki's revision history into a collaboration network, we propose an algorithm that identifies as authors of a page the users who provided the most of its relevant content, measured in terms of quantity and of acceptance by the community. The scalability of this approach allows us to study the English Wikipedia community as a co-authorship network. We find evidence of the presence of a nucleus of very active contributors, who seem to spread over the whole wiki, and to interact preferentially with inexperienced users. The fundamental role played by this elite is witnessed by the growing centrality of sociometric stars in the network. Isolating the community active around a category, it is possible to study its specific dynamics and most influential authors.