Patterns of markup use in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a knowledge building community that lets anyone create and edit articles. While editing articles, users employ visual structure elements (VSE) to format content. VSEs are part of the Wikipedia markup language. All creation and editing events are recorded in a revision history. An unsupervised learning approach was used to analyze a dataset with more than 2,000,000 revisions of 126,000 articles. Using K-Means clustering and association rules mining a general classification of revisions was derived. Relevant classes include vandalism revisions, correction revisions and common revisions. Each class was later studied, and patterns of usage of markups elements identified. Those results help to identify the user intention, and the knowledge of VSE use could contribute to improving the actual text editors provide by Wikipedia to improve the editor's activity finally.