Our paper explores contribution patterns of creativity and collaboration of Wikipedia editors as manifestations of social dynamics between the editors. We find support for existence of four socially constructed personas among the editors and difference in distribution of personas in articles of different qualities.
Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors' activity and the articles' level of complexity. Using our metrics, one can better identify the human-lab…
Wikipedia serves as a good example of how editors collaborate to form and maintain an article. The relationship between editors, derived from their sequence of editing activity, results in a directed network structure called the revision network, that potentially holds valuable insights into editing activity. In this paper we create revision networks to assess differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, as labelled by Wikipedia. Originating from complex networks, we apply motif analysis, which determines the under or over-representation of induced sub-structures, in this …
Wikipedia has a strong norm of writing in a 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Articles that violate this norm are tagged, and editors are encouraged to make corrections. But the impact of this tagging system has not been quantitatively measured. Does NPOV tagging help articles to converge to the desired style? Do NPOV corrections encourage editors to adopt this style? We study these questions using a corpus of NPOV-tagged articles and a set of lexicons associated with biased language. An interrupted time series analysis shows that after an article is tagged for NPOV, there is a significant decre…
The different Wikipedia language editions vary dramatically in how comprehensive they are. As a result, most language editions contain only a small fraction of the sum of information that exists across all Wikipedias. In this paper, we present an approach to filling gaps in article coverage across different Wikipedia editions. Our main contribution is an end-to-end system for recommending articles for creation that exist in one language but are missing in another. The system involves identifying missing articles, ranking the missing articles according to their importance, and recommending impo…
Success of planetary-scale online collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia is hinged on active and continued participation of its voluntary contributors. The phenomenal success of Wikipedia as a valued multilingual source of information is a testament to the possibilities of collective intelligence. Specifically, the sustained and prudent contributions by the experienced prolific editors play a crucial role to operate the platform smoothly for decades. However, it has been brought to light that growth of Wikipedia is stagnating in terms of the number of editors that faces steady decline over …
Wikipedia articles aim to be definitive sources of encyclopedic content. Yet, only 0.6% of Wikipedia articles have high quality according to its quality scale due to insufficient number of Wikipedia editors and enormous number of articles. Supervised Machine Learning (ML) quality improvement approaches that can automatically identify and fix content issues rely on manual labels of individual Wikipedia sentence quality. However, current labeling approaches are tedious and produce noisy labels. Here, we propose an automated labeling approach that identifies the semantic category (e.g., adding ci…
Wikipedia is a major source of information providing a large variety of content online, trusted by readers from around the world. Readers go to Wikipedia to get reliable information about different subjects, one of the most popular being living people, and especially politicians. While a lot is known about the general usage and information consumption on Wikipedia, less is known about the life-cycle and quality of Wikipedia articles in the context of politics. The aim of this study is to quantify and qualify content production and consumption for articles about politicians, with a specific foc…
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic was a historic social disruption with significant consequences felt around the globe. Wikipedia is a freely-available, peer-produced encyclopedia with a remarkable ability to create and revise content following current events. Using 973,940 revisions from 134,337 editors to 4,238 articles, this study examines the dynamics of the English Wikipedia's response to the coronavirus pandemic through the first five months of 2020 as a "quantitative portrait" describing the emergent collaborative behavior at three levels of analysis: article revision, editor contributions,…
Women Through the Glass Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia
维基百科是一个社区创建的百科全书，旨在从中立的角度记录世界知识，为历史的写作做出贡献从未像今天这样容易。虽然每个人都可以参与，但众所周知，编辑社区的多样性很小，大多数是白人男性编辑。虽然这种参与性\emph{gender gap}已被广泛研究的文献，这项工作规定了\emph{assess potential gender inequalities in Wikipedia articles}沿不同的维度：显著性，主题焦点，语言偏见，结构特性，和元数据呈现。我们发现：（i）女性在维基百科中比男性更受关注，这是一种微妙的玻璃天花板效应的结果;（ii）与家庭、性别和关系相关的主题在女性传记中出现得更多;（iii）语言偏见在维基百科中表现出来，因为抽象的术语倾向于在男性传记中描述积极的方面，而在女性传记中描述消极的方面;以及（iv）在元数据和超链接方面存在结构差异，这对信息搜索活动产生影响。虽然由于历史和社会背景，一些差异是可以预料的，但其他差异可归因于维基百科的编辑。这些差异的影响进行了讨论，维基百科的贡献政策铭记。我们希望，目前的工作将有助于提高认识，第一，性别问题的维基百科的内容，第二，不同层次上的性别偏见可以体现在网络上。
Automated software agents --- or bots --- have long been an important part of how Wikipedia's volunteer community of editors write, edit, update, monitor, and moderate content. In this paper, I discuss the complex social and technical environment in which Wikipedia's bots operate. This paper focuses on the establishment and role of English Wikipedia's bot policies and the Bot Approvals Group, a volunteer committee that reviews applications for new bots and helps resolve conflicts between Wikipedians about automation. In particular, I examine an early bot controversy over the first bot in Wikip…
Hyperlinks constitute the backbone of the Web; they enable user navigation, information discovery, content ranking, and many other crucial services on the Internet. In particular, hyperlinks found within Wikipedia allow the readers to navigate from one page to another to expand their knowledge on a given subject of interest or to discover a new one. However, despite Wikipedia editors' efforts to add and maintain its content, the distribution of links remains sparse in many language editions. This paper introduces a machine-in-the-loop entity linking system that can comply with community guidel…
