Quantitative analysis of thewikipedia community of users
Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis
OntoWiki – a tool for social, semantic collaboration
ISWC'06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on The Semantic Web
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The aim of this work is to model quantitatively one of the main properties of wikis: how high quality knowledge can emerge from the individual work of independent volunteers. The approach chosen is to simulate knowledge collection and curation in wikis. The basic model represents the wiki as a set of of true/false values, added and edited at each simulation round by software agents (users) following a fixed set of rules. The resulting WikiSim simulations already manage to reach distributions of edits and user contributions very close to those reported for Wikipedia. WikiSim can also span conditions not easily measurable in real-life wikis, such as the impact of various amounts of user mistakes. WikiSim could be extended to model wiki software features, such as discussion pages and watch lists, while monitoring the impact they have on user actions and consensus, and their effect on knowledge quality. The method could also be used to compare wikis with other curation scenarios based on centralised editing by experts. The future challenges for WikiSim will be to find appropriate ways to evaluate and validate the models and to keep them simple while still capturing relevant properties of wiki systems.