Wikipedia editing dynamics

Gandica, Yérali; Carvalho, J.; Aidos, F. Sampaio dos

doi:10.1103/physreve.91.012824

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…These intense activities in Wikipedia are reported as "Wikipedia Edit War," which refers to significantly rapid consecutive editing by various editors with conflicting opinions [26]. Our observation indicates that the "edit number" (or the number of edits), which many studies use as the proxy of the real time [17,19], is not an unbiased proxy of the time. Counterposed to the assumption that English Wikipedia has already become global media, we observe strong periodicity for the time between the consecutive edits in Fig.…”

Section: A Edit Scale Of Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The heterogeneity for the ratio of the number of editors to that of edits, N * p /N * e , leads us to the eventual question: is this heterogeneity from structural inequality? In other words, does the existence of dictatorship or monopoly of small group editors, or super editors [17], make it difficult for others to participate in editing processes? To find the answer, we use the Gini coefficient, which is a common measure for inequality in economics [46] ranging from 0 for the minimal inequality (or the maximal equality) to 1 as the maximal inequality.…”

Section: Inequalities In Wikipedia Editingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A bizarre gap between such prejudice and the actual situation appeals to the scholars, who have analyzed Wikipedia's external characters and internal dynamics. For example, researchers have investigated editors of Wikipedia and their editing patterns [15][16][17], and the occurrence and resolving of conflicts in Wikipedia [18,19]. Despite the significant contributions of such endeavors, the previous studies mainly focus on the raw number of edits, and often neglect real time and the different editing patterns for articles with different sizes and ages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia

2016

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Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia with an enormous amount of content. This encyclopedia is written by volunteers with various backgrounds in a collective fashion; anyone can access and edit most of the articles. This open-editing nature may give us prejudice that Wikipedia is an unstable and unreliable source; yet many studies suggest that Wikipedia is even more accurate and self-consistent than traditional encyclopedias. Scholars have attempted to understand such extraordinary credibility, but usually used the number of edits as the unit of time, without consideration of real-time. In this work, we probe the formation of such collective intelligence through a systematic analysis using the entire history of 34 534 110 English Wikipedia articles, between 2001 and 2014. From this massive data set, we observe the universality of both timewise and lengthwise editing scales, which suggests that it is essential to consider the real-time dynamics. By considering real time, we find the existence of distinct growth patterns that are unobserved by utilizing the number of edits as the unit of time. To account for these results, we present a mechanistic model that adopts the article editing dynamics based on both editor-editor and editor-article interactions. The model successfully generates the key properties of real Wikipedia articles such as distinct types of articles for the editing patterns characterized by the interrelationship between the numbers of edits and editors, and the article size. In addition, the model indicates that infrequently referred articles tend to grow faster than frequently referred ones, and articles attracting a high motivation to edit counterintuitively reduce the number of participants. We suggest that this decay of participants eventually brings inequality among the editors, which will become more severe with time.

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Section: A Edit Scale Of Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Inequalities In Wikipedia Editingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia

2016

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“…In the edits, we include any action done by WP-users, including correction, addition, and deletion. The motivation for including all these actions is the hypothesis stating that the higher the number of edits, the greater the interest on that subject [8]. The Y-axis represents, in different colors, the proportion of edits in each category.…”

Section: A By Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population Preferences Through Wikipedia Edits

Gandica¹

2018

2018 Fifth International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS)

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In this work, we are interested in the inner-cultural background shaping broad people's preferences. Our interest is also to track this human footprint, as it has the tendency to disappear due to the nowadays globalization. Given that language is a social construction, it is part of the historical reservoir, shaping the cultural (and hence collective) identity, then helping the community to archive accumulated knowledge about its culture and identity. We assume that the collective interest of a language-speaking community to document their events, people and any feature important for them, by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, can act as a footprint of the whole group's collective identity. The analysis of the language's preferences into categories among several languages, could have also applications into the field of Multilingual Natural Language Processing (MNLP). We, then, report results about the number of edits, editors, and pages into categories, displayed by the several languages. Results are shown by several angles, and some extra measures complement the analysis.

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“…On the other hand, studies have proved that the current state of accuracy of Wikipedia is remarkable; the accuracy of its contents surpasses that of traditional encyclopaedias [4,5]. Nevertheless, researchers found significant heterogeneities in the editing processes, based on the monopoly or oligopoly of a few supereditors' who govern the contents; thus, it is still far from being the Elysium of communal knowledge that we desire it to be [6,7,8,9,10].…”

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confidence: 99%

Early onset of structural inequality in the formation of collaborative knowledge in all Wikimedia projects

2018

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We perform an in-depth analysis on the inequality in 863 Wikimedia projects. We take the complete editing history of 267 304 095 Wikimedia items until 2016, which not only covers every language edition of Wikipedia, but also embraces the complete versions of Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, etc. Our findings of common growth pattern described by the interrelations between four characteristic growth yardsticks suggest a universal law of communal data formation. In this encyclopaedic data set, we observe the interplay between the number of edits and the degree of inequality. In particular, the rapid increase in the Gini coefficient suggests that this entrenched inequality stems from the nature of such open-editing communal data sets, namely the abiogenesis of the supereditors' oligopoly. We show that these supereditor groups were created at the early stages of these open-editing media and are still active. Furthermore, our model considers both short-term and long-term memories to successfully elucidate the underlying mechanism of the establishment of oligarchy in Wikipedia. Our results anticipate a noticeable prospect of such communal databases in the future: the disparity will not be resolved spontaneously.

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Wikipedia editing dynamics

Cited by 11 publications

References 25 publications

Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia

Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia

Population Preferences Through Wikipedia Edits

Early onset of structural inequality in the formation of collaborative knowledge in all Wikimedia projects

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