A simple model of edit activity in Wikipedia

Takashi Shimada, Fumiko Ogushi, János Török, János Kertész, Kimmo Kaski

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

A simple dynamical model of collective edit activity of Wikipedia articles and their content evolution is introduced. Based on the recent empirical findings, each editor in the model is characterized by an ability to make content edit, i.e., improving the article by adding content and a tendency to make maintenance edit, i.e., dealing with formal aspects and maintaining the edit flow. In addition, each article is characterized by a level of maturity as compared to a potential quality needed to comprehensively cover its topic. This model is found to reproduce the basic structure of the bipartite network between editors and articles of Wikipedia. Furthermore, the relation between the model parameters of editors and articles and the metrics of those calculated from the emergent network turns out to be robust, i.e. depending only on the rate of the introduction of new articles to the editing activity. This results provides us a way to relate observations in the real data to the hidden characteristics of editors and articles. For the nestedness of the networks, systems with weighted parameter distribution gives better match to the empirical one. This suggests the importance of high-dimensional nature of the ability of editors and quality of articles in the real system.

Original languageEnglish
Article number129253
JournalPhysica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
Volume630
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 Sep 2023

Keywords

  • Modeling
  • Wikipedia

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