Wikipedia: A Complex Social Machine

Wikipedia represents a successful peer-produced knowledge-resource constructed via the endeavours of millions of volunteers. We examine the activity of Wikipedia by analysing WikiProjects, an community-driven feature which allows communities of Wikipedians to coordinate their efforts in order to improve or produce Wikipedia articles. We harvested the content of over 600 active Wikipedia projects, which comprised of over 100 million edits and 15 million Talk entries, associated with over 1.5 million Wikipedia articles and Talk pages produced by 14 million unique users. Our analysis reveals findings related to the overall positive activity and growth of Wikipedia, as well as the connected community of Wikipedians within and between specific WikiProjects. We argue that the complexity of Wikipedia requires metrics which reflect the many aspects of the Wikipedia social machine, and by doing so, will offer insights into it’s state of health.

[1]  Albert,et al.  Emergence of scaling in random networks , 1999, Science.

[2]  Stacey Kuznetsov,et al.  Motivations of contributors to Wikipedia , 2006, CSOC.

[3]  Bryan A. Pendleton,et al.  Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie , 2006 .

[4]  Panayiotis Zaphiris,et al.  Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[5]  Guido Caldarelli,et al.  Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of Wikipedia , 2006, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[6]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia , 2007, CHI.

[7]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination , 2008, CSCW.

[8]  Han-Teng Liao.  Conflictual consensus in the Chinese version of Wikipedia , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society.

[9]  John Riedl,et al.  Is Wikipedia growing a longer tail? , 2009, GROUP.

[10]  James M. Purtilo,et al.  Measuring the wikisphere , 2009, Int. Sym. Wikis.

[11]  Jaap Kamps,et al.  Is Wikipedia link structure different? , 2009, WSDM '09.

[12]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia , 2009, Int. Sym. Wikis.

[13]  Alex Dekhtyar,et al.  On measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles , 2010, WICOW '10.

[14]  Sudha Ram,et al.  Who does what: Collaboration patterns in the wikipedia and their impact on article quality , 2011, TMIS.

[15]  Oliver Ferschke,et al.  Behind the Article: Recognizing Dialog Acts in Wikipedia Talk Pages , 2012, EACL.

[16]  Toru Ishida,et al.  Analysis of discussion contributions in translated Wikipedia articles , 2012, ICIC '12.

[17]  Jonathan T. Morgan,et al.  The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System , 2013 .

[18]  Les Carr,et al.  The HTP model: understanding the development of social machines , 2013, WWW.

[19]  David W. McDonald,et al.  A content analysis of wikiproject discussions: toward a typology of coordination language used by virtual teams , 2013, CSCW '13.

[20]  H. Potts,et al.  Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study , 2013, Journal of medical Internet research.

[21]  Kevin Crowston,et al.  The rise and fall of an online project: is bureaucracy killing efficiency in open knowledge production? , 2015, OpenSym.

[22]  James A. Hendler,et al.  Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity , 2016 .