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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 15: Poster Session

SOE 15.14: Poster

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 16:50–17:50, Poster F

Fighting and writing, conflicts and editorial wars in Wikipedia — •Taha Yasseri, Róbert Sumi, András Rung, András Kornai, and János Kertész — Institute of Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Wikipedia is one of the few examples of large-scale collective cooperation of individuals with no external supervision or motivation, in which considerable amount of valuable information is generated and collected. Despite the recent efforts to characterize the rapid growth and development of Wikipedia, the underlying mechanisms that modulate this improvement are yet to be unravelled. This would yield a better understanding of the emergence of information through consensus of opinions on numerous article contents. In this work, we first develop a method to detect and rank the controversial issues [1] which are most disputed and debated by the Wikipedia editors. Based on this analysis, we characterize the temporal features of the editorial wars. On short-time scales, we observe an evident relation between the bursts of the editorial activities and the intensity of the conflicts. Peaceful situations on the other hand, result in more diverse and uncorrelated editorial contributions. On long-time scales, our phenomenological model can distinguish between the external factors which influence the behaviour of the editors and the internal causes of the conflicts related to the diversity of editors’ opinions on the solid facts.

[1] R. Sumi, T. Yasseri, A. Rung, A. Kornai, and J. Kertész, Edit wars in Wikipedia, IEEE SocialCom, 3rd Intl Conf on Social Computing, Boston Oct. (2011).