What The Editing History Of Wikipedia Reveals

Wikipedia is edited by volunteers worldwide but still has a surprising order, according to an analysis of its edit history.

AsianScientist (Feb. 15, 2016) – A study of the entire editing history of the English version of Wikipedia has revealed that the articles cluster into four categories based on how frequently and how aggressively they are edited. The article was published in Physical Review E.

Wikipedia allows anyone to contribute to its millions of articles and doesn’t exert any central control; yet, striking order has emerged, according to the researchers’ analysis of the entire editing history of the English portion of the website. They found that articles fall into four main categories based on the way they are edited, and that a relatively small number of editors have a major influence on the site.

The team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) set out to discover if the full history of Wikipedia growth shows any general patterns or regularities, either in the structure of articles, or the behavior of editors.

Lead author Yun Jinhyuk and colleagues examined the data for the entire edit history of English Wikipedia, including more than five million articles, millions of “talk” pages, and 587 million editing events. The length of a typical article increases with age, as do the numbers of edits and editors, so the researchers decided to rescale the data by age—essentially dividing each number by the age of the article—to allow fair comparisons.

The team found that Wikipedia articles fall into four distinct groups based on two independent classifications: edit frequency and length of each editor’s contributions.

For edit frequency, one group is edited roughly twice as often as the other. For the second classification, editor contribution length, one group of articles had the typical editor contributing roughly 30 times as many words as editors in the other group, even for articles with the same total length. Most articles fell into one of the four combinations of these attributes.

“The categories are clearly distinguished by the editor-editor or editor-article relationships,” said Yun. “But this only becomes clear when the data is re-scaled by article age.”

To understand these patterns, the researchers built a model that could simulate the growth of an artificial Wikipedia. It involved a large, random network of editors who can interact with their neighbors and who start with a randomly assigned opinion of an article topic, represented by a number between zero and one.

The team found that their version also showed the same four distinct groups, but only if certain key parameters, q and p, took the right values. q reflects how likely it is that an editor will choose to edit an article if his or her opinion on the topic differs from that of Wikipedia. p reflects a more subtle property linked to the general level of trust that editors have toward Wikipedia, relative to other media sources.

As editors interact with one another and their opinions shift, higher p makes opinions move more quickly toward those expressed by Wikipedia.

Notably, the four distinct categories found point to a persisting inequality of influence—with a small number of super-editors controlling the form of many articles.

“There are already reports that the growth of Wikipedia is slowing down, and our observation indicates that this will continue unless something is done about it,” said Yun.

He suggested that the encyclopedia needs to recruit more new participants to sustain rich, collaborative environments and to avoid the monopolization of content by a few people.

The article can be found at: Yun et al. (2016) Intellectual Interchanges in the History of the Massive Online Open-editing Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

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Source: APS Physics.
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