ABSTRACT
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, is a live social experiment: millions of individuals volunteer their knowledge and time to collective create it. It is hence interesting trying to understand how they do it. While most of the scholar attention focused on article pages, a less investigated share of activities happen on user talk pages, Wikipedia pages where a message can be left for the specific user. This public conversations can be studied from a Social Network Analysis perspective in order to highlight the structure of the "talk" network. In this paper we focus on this preliminary extraction step by proposing different algorithms. We then empirically validate the differences in the networks they generate on the Venetian Wikipedia with the real network of conversations extracted manually by coding every message left on all user talk pages. The comparisons show that both the algorithms and the manual process contain inaccuracies that are intrinsic in the freedom and unpredictability of Wikipedia syntax and practices. Nevertheless, a precise description of the involved issues allows to make informed decisions and to base empirical findings on reproducible evidence. Our goal is to lay the foundation for a solid computational sociology of wikis. For this reason we release the scripts encoding our algorithms as open source and also some datasets extracted out of Wikipedia conversations, in order to let other researchers replicate and improve our initial effort.
- Giles, J. 2005. Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Nature, Vol. 438, No. 7070.Google Scholar
- List of largest wikis. Retrieved on January 29, 2011 at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_wikisGoogle Scholar
- Mislove, A., Marcon, M., Gummadi, K. P, Druschel, P., Bhattacharjee, B. 2007. Measurement and analysis of online social networks. 7th ACM conference Internet measurement Google ScholarDigital Library
- Halvey, M. J., Keane, M. T. 2007. Exploring social dynamics in online media sharing. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1273--1274. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zelenkauskaite, A. and Massa, P. 2011. Tracing the interpersonal value of Wikipedia community interaction over time. Under review at Wikisym 2011.Google Scholar
- Massa, P and Zelenkauskaite, A. 2011. Digital libraries and social Web: Insights from Wikipedia Users' activities. In Proceedings of IADIS Collaborative Technologies 2011.Google Scholar
- Capocci, A., Servedio, V. D. P., Colaiori, F., Buriol, L. S., Donato, D., Leonardi, S., and Caldarelli, G. 2006. Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics, 74(3 Pt 2).Google Scholar
- Bellomi, F., Bonato, R. 2005. Network Analysis for Wikipedia. In Proceedings of Wikimania 2005.Google Scholar
- Zlatic, V., Bozicevic, M., Stefancic, H. and Domazet, M. 2006. Collaborative web-based encyclopedias as complex networks. Physical Review E, 74:016115.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zesch, T., Gurevych, I. 2007. Analysis of the Wikipedia Category Graph for NLP Applications. In Proceedings of the TextGraphs-2 Workshop (NAACL-HLT)Google Scholar
- Schonhofen, P. 2006. Identifying Document Topics Using the Wikipedia Category Network. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Viegas, R. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J. and van Ham, F. 2007. Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia. Proceedings of HICSS '07. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Crandall, D., Cosley, D., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J. and Suri, S. 2008. Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities. In Proceeding of ACM SIGKDD international conference. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Leskovec, J., Huttenlocher, D. P. and Kleinberg, J. 2010. Governance in Social Media: A Case Study of the Wikipedia Promotion Process. ICWSM conference, AAAI Press.Google Scholar
- Kittur, A. and Kraut, R. E. 2010. Beyond Wikipedia: coordination and conflict in online production groups. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on CSCW. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Welser, H. T., Cosley, D., Kossinets, G., Lin, A., Dokshin, F., Gay, G., Smith, M. 2011. Finding social roles in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 122--129. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kimura, M., Saito, K., and Motoda, H. 2009. Blocking links to minimize contamination spread in a social network. ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data 3, 2, Article 9. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Iba, T., Nemoto, K., Peters, B. and Gloor, P. 2009. Analyzing the Creative Editing Behavior of Wikipedia Editors Through Dynamic Social Network Analysis. COINs Collaborative Innovations Networks Conference.Google Scholar
- Suh, B., Chi, E. H., Pendleton, B. A., and Kittur. A. 2007. Us vs. them: understanding social dynamics in Wikipedia with revert graph visualizations. IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST '07), 163--170. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brandes, U., Kenis, P., Lerner, J., van Raaij, D. 2009. Network analysis of collaboration structure in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of World Wide Web conference. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Geiger, S. 2010. What is in Control of Wikipedia? Talk at Critical Point of View Conference.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Social networks of Wikipedia
Recommendations
DAWT: Densely Annotated Wikipedia Texts Across Multiple Languages
WWW '17 Companion: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web CompanionIn this work, we open up the DAWT dataset - Densely Annotated Wikipedia Texts across multiple languages. The annotations include labeled text mentions mapping to entities (represented by their Freebase machine ids) as well as the type of the entity. The ...
Wikipedia's “Neutral Point of View”: Settling Conflict through Ambiguity
This article discusses how one of the most important Wikipedia policies, the “neutral point of view” (NPOV), is appropriated and interpreted by the participants in the Wikipedia project. By analyzing a set of constitutive documents for the Wikipedian ...
With a Little Help from my Neighbors: Person Name Linking Using the Wikipedia Social Network
WWW '16 Companion: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide WebDriven by the popularity of social networks, there has been an increasing interest in employing such networks in the context of named entity linking. In this paper, we present a novel approach to person name disambiguation and linking that uses a large-...
Comments