Us vs. Them: Understanding Social Dynamics in Wikipedia with Revert Graph Visualizations

Abstract

Wikipedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia that has become one of the most popular collaborative on-line knowledge systems. As in any large collaborative system, as Wikipedia has grown, conflicts and coordination costs have increased dramatically. Visual analytic tools provide a mechanism for addressing these issues by enabling users to more quickly and effectively make sense of the status of a collaborative environment. In this paper we describe a model for identifying patterns of conflicts in Wikipedia articles. The model relies on users' editing history and the relationships between user edits, especially revisions that void previous edits, known as "reverts". Based on this model, we constructed Revert Graph, a tool that visualizes the overall conflict patterns between groups of users. It enables visual analysis of opinion groups and rapid interactive exploration of those relationships via detail drilldowns. We present user patterns and case studies that show the effectiveness of these techniques, and discuss how they could generalize to other systems.

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

“…Suh et al (2007) proposed a user conflict model to uncover patterns of conflicts in Wikipedia articles. Based on this model, they developed a visualization tool, Revert graph, to depicts the revert relationships between groups of users.…”

Network analysis of collaboration structure in Wikipedia

“…Kittur, Suh et al [15,24] constructed a network of authors, where an edge (u, v) indicates that u reverted a version submitted by v. These edges are interpreted as negative relationships between users and the networks are drawn with a force-directed layout algorithm that let heavily connected users repulse each other. A similar network has been built by coding repeated immediate revisions (not just reverts) between users [6].…”

Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

“…Conflicts in Wikipedia have previously been studied by observing article edit histories [5], by considering reverts [4,13], by analyzing talk pages [7,9], or a combination of the aforementioned [14]. Most of these studies were primarily focused on the social dynamics between editors and only few quantitative approaches have taken into account what the controversy is about, as we do.…”