A Characterization of Regions of Wikipedia Based on Motifs in the Edit Graph

Abstract:

Wikipedia works because of the many eyes idea. Good Wikipedia pages are authoritative sources due to the collaboration of a number of knowledge contributors. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the extent of this collaboration for a specific article can be assessed by looking at the edit graph associated with that article, i.e. the network of contributors and articles. As a first step in this direction we show that different regions of Wikipedia have very different edit graph motif profiles. We show, for example, that articles on sociologists (a well-curated region of Wikipedia) are very different to articles on footballers in the English Premiership.

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