1 research outputs found
Thermodynamic Principles in Social Collaborations
A thermodynamic framework is presented to characterize the evolution of
efficiency, order, and quality in social content production systems, and this
framework is applied to the analysis of Wikipedia. Contributing editors are
characterized by their (creative) energy levels in terms of number of edits. We
develop a definition of entropy that can be used to analyze the efficiency of
the system as a whole, and relate it to the evolution of power-law
distributions and a metric of quality. The concept is applied to the analysis
of eight years of Wikipedia editing data and results show that (1) Wikipedia
has become more efficient during its evolution and (2) the entropy-based
efficiency metric has high correlation with observed readership of Wikipedia
pages.Comment: Presented at Collective Intelligence conference, 2012
(arXiv:1204.2991