Edit wars in Wikipedia

We present a new, efficient method for automatically detecting severe conflicts `edit wars' in Wikipedia and evaluate this method on six different language WPs. We discuss how the number of edits, reverts, the length of discussions, the burstiness of edits and reverts deviate in such pages from those following the general workflow, and argue that earlier work has significantly over-estimated the contentiousness of the Wikipedia editing process.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. The current version is shortened to be published in SocialCom 201

The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis

We present, visualize and analyse the similarities and differences between the controversial topics related to "edit wars" identified in 10 different language versions of Wikipedia. After a brief review of the related work we describe the methods developed to locate, measure, and categorize the controversial topics in the different languages. Visualizations of the degree of overlap between the top 100 lists of most controversial articles in different languages and the content related to geographical locations will be presented. We discuss what the presented analysis and visualizations can tell us about the multicultural aspects of Wikipedia and practices of peer-production. Our results indicate that Wikipedia is more than just an encyclopaedia; it is also a window into convergent and divergent social-spatial priorities, interests and preferences.Comment: This is a draft of a book chapter to be published in 2014 by Scarecrow Press. Please cite as: Yasseri T., Spoerri A., Graham M., and Kert\'esz J., The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis. In: Fichman P., Hara N., editors, Global Wikipedia:International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration. Scarecrow Press (2014

Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap

In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns. However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age. We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity patterns of Wikipedia.Comment: Submitte

Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data

Use of socially generated "big data" to access information about collective states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this would be the prediction of the society's reaction to a new product in the sense of popularity and adoption rate. However, bridging the gap between "real time monitoring" and "early predicting" remains a big challenge. Here we report on an endeavor to build a minimalistic predictive model for the financial success of movies based on collective activity data of online users. We show that the popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.Comment: 13 pages, Including Supporting Information, 7 Figures, Download the dataset from: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/SupplementaryDataS1.zi

Circadian patterns of Wikipedia editorial activity: A demographic analysis

Wikipedia (WP) as a collaborative, dynamical system of humans is an appropriate subject of social studies. Each single action of the members of this society, i.e. editors, is well recorded and accessible. Using the cumulative data of 34 Wikipedias in different languages, we try to characterize and find the universalities and differences in temporal activity patterns of editors. Based on this data, we estimate the geographical distribution of editors for each WP in the globe. Furthermore we also clarify the differences among different groups of WPs, which originate in the variance of cultural and social features of the communities of editors

Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when

Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia

In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the activity in these samples. On short time scales, we show that there is a clear correspondence between conflict and burstiness of activity patterns, and that memory effects play an important role in controversies. On long time scales, we identify three distinct developmental patterns for the overall behavior of the articles. We are able to distinguish cases eventually leading to consensus from those cases where a compromise is far from achievable. Finally, we analyze discussion networks and conclude that edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only.Comment: Supporting information adde

Establishing Information Quality Guidelines in Social Information Systems: Comparison and Discussion of Two Approaches

Social Information Systems (SocIS) enable many people to interact digitally and collaboratively create and share digital content. Nevertheless, the large and heterogenous SocIS communities make it challenging to ensure information quality (IQ) because members’ interpretation and evaluation of content might be very different. As a remedy, many platforms explicitly state normative IQ guidelines. Guidelines can be developed either by the community members themselves or by the platform provider (and imposed on the community). It is unclear, however, which of these two approaches members agree with more strongly and which produces the more satisficatory IQ guidelines. Through an empirical survey study covering 15 different SocIS platforms, we find that members do agree more and are more satisfied when guidelines have been developed by the community. These findings are important for platform providers to improve IQ and retain members, and also inform research on IQ in SocIS

TRACE: A Stigmergic Crowdsourcing Platform for Intelligence Analysis

Crowdsourcing has become a frequently adopted approach to solving various tasks from conducting surveys to designing products. In the field of reasoning-support, however, crowdsourcing-related research and application have not been extensively implemented. Reasoning-support is essential in intelligence analysis to help analysts mitigate various cognitive biases, enhance deliberation, and improve report writing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to designing a crowdsourcing platform that facilitates stigmergic coordination, awareness, and communication for intelligence analysis. We have partly materialized our proposal in the form of a crowdsourcing system which supports intelligence analysis: TRACE (Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for Collaboration and Evaluation). We introduce several stigmergic approaches integrated into TRACE and discuss the potential experimentation of these approaches. We also explain the design implications for further development of TRACE and similar crowdsourcing systems to support reasoning