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

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

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

Are anonymity-seekers just like everybody else? An analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from Tor

User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective, collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of Wikipedia users. Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through Wikipedia's ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of registered users.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, May 202

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase, and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm

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

Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life

In his 2003 essay E O Wilson outlined his vision for an “encyclopaedia of life” comprising “an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth”, each page containing “the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.” Although the “quiet revolution” in biodiversity informatics has generated numerous online resources, including some directly inspired by Wilson's essay (e.g., "http://ispecies.org":http://ispecies.org, "http://www.eol.org":http://www.eol.org), we are still some way from the goal of having available online all relevant information about a species, such as its taxonomy, evolutionary history, genomics, morphology, ecology, and behaviour. While the biodiversity community has been developing a plethora of databases, some with overlapping goals and duplicated content, Wikipedia has been slowly growing to the point where it now has over 100,000 pages on biological taxa. My goal in this essay is to explore the idea that, largely independent of the efforts of biodiversity informatics and well-funded international efforts, Wikipedia ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has emerged as potentially the best platform for fulfilling E O Wilson’s vision

VoG: Summarizing and Understanding Large Graphs

How can we succinctly describe a million-node graph with a few simple sentences? How can we measure the "importance" of a set of discovered subgraphs in a large graph? These are exactly the problems we focus on. Our main ideas are to construct a "vocabulary" of subgraph-types that often occur in real graphs (e.g., stars, cliques, chains), and from a set of subgraphs, find the most succinct description of a graph in terms of this vocabulary. We measure success in a well-founded way by means of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle: a subgraph is included in the summary if it decreases the total description length of the graph. Our contributions are three-fold: (a) formulation: we provide a principled encoding scheme to choose vocabulary subgraphs; (b) algorithm: we develop \method, an efficient method to minimize the description cost, and (c) applicability: we report experimental results on multi-million-edge real graphs, including Flickr and the Notre Dame web graph.Comment: SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 201