Abstract
Wikipedia is a multilingual encyclopedia that works on the idea of virtual collaboration. Initially, its contents such as articles, editors and edits grow exponentially. Further growth analysis of Wikipedia shows slowdown or saturation in its contents. In this paper, we investigate whether two essential characteristics of Wikipedia, collaboration and cohesiveness also encounter the phenomenon of slowdown or saturation with time. Collaboration in Wikipedia is the process where two or more editors edit together to complete a common article. Cohesiveness is the extent to which a group of editors stays together for mutual interest. We employ the concept of network motifs to investigate saturation in these two considered characteristics of Wikipedia. We consider star motifs of articles with the average number of edits to study the growth of collaboration and 2 \(\times \) 2 complete bicliques or “butterfly” motifs to interpret the change in the cohesiveness of Wikipedia. We present the change in the count of the mentioned network motifs for the top 22 languages of Wikipedia upto May 2019. We observe saturation in collaboration while the linear or sudden rise in cohesiveness in most of the languages of Wikipedia. We therefore notice, although the contents of Wikipedia encounter natural limits of growth, the activities of editors are still improving with time.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
References
Almeida, R.B., Mozafari, B., Cho, J.: On the evolution of wikipedia. In: ICWSM. Citeseer, Princeton (2007)
Bennett, L.M., Gadlin, H.: Collaboration and team science: from theory to practice. J. Invest. Med. 60(5), 768–775 (2012)
Capocci, A., Servedio, V.D., Colaiori, F., Buriol, L.S., Donato, D., Leonardi, S., Caldarelli, G.: Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the internet encyclopedia wikipedia. Phys. Rev. E 74(3), 036116 (2006)
Chandra, A., Maiti, A.: Modeling new and old editors’ behaviors in different languages of wikipedia. In: International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, pp. 438–453. Springer (2018)
Gandica, Y., Carvalho, J., dos Aidos, F.S.: Wikipedia editing dynamics. Phys. Rev. E 91(1), 012824 (2015)
Gibbons, A., Vetrano, D., Biancani, S.: Wikipedia: Nowhere to grow (2012)
Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., Riedl, J.: Don’t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of wikipedia work. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 163–172. ACM (2011)
Jurgens, D., Lu, T.C.: Temporal motifs reveal the dynamics of editor interactions in wikipedia. In: Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2012)
Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B.A., Chi, E.H.: He says, she says: conflict and coordination in wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 453–462. ACM (2007)
Mickan, S., Rodger, S.: Characteristics of effective teams: a literature review. Aust. Health Rev. 23(3), 201–208 (2000)
Rotabi, R., Kamath, K., Kleinberg, J., Sharma, A.: Detecting strong ties using network motifs. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, pp. 983–992. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (2017)
Sanei-Mehri, S.V., Sariyuce, A.E., Tirthapura, S.: Butterfly counting in bipartite networks. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, pp. 2150–2159. ACM (2018)
Saracco, F., di Clemente, R., Gabrielli, A., Squartini, T.: Detecting early signs of the 2007–2008 crisis in the world trade. Sci. Rep. 6, 30286 (2016)
Simmons, B.I., Sweering, M.J., Schillinger, M., Dicks, L.V., Sutherland, W.J., Di Clemente, R.: bmotif: a package for motif analyses of bipartite networks. BioRxiv, p. 302356 (2018)
Suh, B., Convertino, G., Chi, E.H., Pirolli, P.: The singularity is not near: slowing growth of wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, p. 8. ACM (2009)
Voss, J.: Measuring wikipedia (2005)
Wang, J., Fu, A.W.C., Cheng, J.: Rectangle counting in large bipartite graphs. In: 2014 IEEE International Congress on Big Data, pp. 17–24. IEEE (2014)
Wilkinson, D.M., Huberman, B.A.: Assessing the value of coooperation in wikipedia. arXiv preprint cs/0702140 (2007)
Yang, L., Wu, L., Liu, Y., Kang, C.: Quantifying tourist behavior patterns by travel motifs and geo-tagged photos from flickr. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 6(11), 345 (2017)
Zlatić, V., Štefančić, H.: Model of wikipedia growth based on information exchange via reciprocal arcs. EPL (Europhysics Letters) 93(5), 58005 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chandra, A., Maiti, A. (2020). Investigating Saturation in Collaboration and Cohesiveness of Wikipedia Using Motifs Analysis. In: Cherifi, H., Gaito, S., Mendes, J., Moro, E., Rocha, L. (eds) Complex Networks and Their Applications VIII. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2019. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 882. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36683-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36683-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36682-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36683-4
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)