Bipartite networks of Wikipedia's articles and authors: a meso-level approach

  • Authors:

  • Rut Jesus;Martin Schwartz;Sune Lehmann

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark;Technical University of Denmark, Denmark;Northeastern University, Boston and Harvard University, Boston, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This exploratory study investigates the bipartite network of articles linked by common editors in Wikipedia, 'The Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit'. We use the articles in the categories (to depth three) of Physics and Philosophy and extract and focus on significant editors (at least 7 or 10 edits per each article). We construct a bipartite network, and from it, overlapping cliques of densely connected articles and editors. We cluster these densely connected cliques into larger modules to study examples of larger groups that display how volunteer editors flock around articles driven by interest, real-world controversies, or the result of coordination in WikiProjects. Our results confirm that topics aggregate editors; and show that highly coordinated efforts result in dense clusters.