89 research outputs found
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
Collective Phenomena and Non-Finite State Computation in a Human Social System
We investigate the computational structure of a paradigmatic example of
distributed social interaction: that of the open-source Wikipedia community. We
examine the statistical properties of its cooperative behavior, and perform
model selection to determine whether this aspect of the system can be described
by a finite-state process, or whether reference to an effectively unbounded
resource allows for a more parsimonious description. We find strong evidence,
in a majority of the most-edited pages, in favor of a collective-state model,
where the probability of a "revert" action declines as the square root of the
number of non-revert actions seen since the last revert. We provide evidence
that the emergence of this social counter is driven by collective interaction
effects, rather than properties of individual users.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; to appear in PLoS ON
Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia
Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems, but
their discussion is often ruled out a priori in quantitative approaches. In
this paper, we show how reference to the irreducible mental states and
psychological dynamics of a group is necessary to make sense of large scale
social phenomena. We introduce the problem of mental boundaries by reference to
a classic problem in the evolution of cooperation. We then provide an explicit
quantitative example drawn from ongoing work on cooperation and conflict among
Wikipedia editors, showing how some, but not all, effects of individual
experience persist in the aggregate. We show the limitations of methodological
individualism, and the substantial benefits that come from being able to refer
to collective intentions, and attributions of cognitive states of the form
"what the group believes" and "what the group values".Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures; matches published versio
Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined
during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is
despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from
generation to generation and within an organism's lifetime. How can organisms
get by by hard-coding the number of sensory neurons? We approach this question
using rate-distortion theory. A combination of simulation and theory suggests
that when environments are large, the rate-distortion function---a proxy for
material costs, timing delays, and energy requirements---depends only on
coarse-grained environmental statistics that are expected to change on
evolutionary, rather than ontogenetic, timescales
The Evolution of Wikipedia's Norm Network
Social norms have traditionally been difficult to quantify. In any particular
society, their sheer number and complex interdependencies often limit a
system-level analysis. One exception is that of the network of norms that
sustain the online Wikipedia community. We study the fifteen-year evolution of
this network using the interconnected set of pages that establish, describe,
and interpret the community's norms. Despite Wikipedia's reputation for
\textit{ad hoc} governance, we find that its normative evolution is highly
conservative. The earliest users create norms that both dominate the network
and persist over time. These core norms govern both content and interpersonal
interactions using abstract principles such as neutrality, verifiability, and
assume good faith. As the network grows, norm neighborhoods decouple
topologically from each other, while increasing in semantic coherence. Taken
together, these results suggest that the evolution of Wikipedia's norm network
is akin to bureaucratic systems that predate the information age.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures. Matches published version. Data available at
http://bit.ly/wiki_nor
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