Local Topology Of Collaborative Editing Network In Wikipedia

Collaborative writing is a common human social practice and has wide application scope. It has received much attention from researchers in multidisciplinary field. With the development of Web2.0, wiki has greatly promoted the development of collaborative wrting for its good support for collaborative writing. In the open wiki community, users achieve social interaction through content interaction. The users’editing behavior play an important role in this process.At present, the study of collaborative writing usually take the organizing writing group as its research object. However, in the open network virtual environment, how group members conduct collaborative writing in self-organized community is still lack research. Wiki community is a kind of self-organizing community. Recently, studies about users’collaborative editing in Wikipedia is mainly from the macro point of view. Studies at the micro level are mainly about conflicts’structure formed by editing behaviors such as delete and revert. There is still a lack of study about the main editing behaviors such as add, revise, and delete.Aimed at the limitations existing in the present study, we will take English Wikipedia as our research object. At the micro level, we will study users’collaborative editing in Wikipedia from the perspective of editing interactions. Firstly, we will analyze the collaborative editing activity between users and provide the users collaborative editing network building method. Secondly, we will randomly select a number of Wikipedia pages with different quality level and extract their revision history. On the basis of these data, we build user collaborative editing networks and detect motifs and colored motifs in these networks. Thirdly, by analizing the meaning of these motifs, we reveal the laws emerging in the process of users collaborative editing. Through comparative analysis, we discover the editing behavior which play an important role in terms of improving the quality of article. Finally, we simulate the collaborative editing activity between users with the help of NetLogo to verify the conclusions obtained through motif analysis.In theory, our work reveals the laws emerging in the process of users collaborative editing, enriches the self-organization theory and studies about collaborative writing and discovers the editing behavior which play an important role in terms of improving the quality of article. At the same time, we also provide a new research perspective when automatically assessing article quality grade. In practical application, our conclusions can help to instruct wiki systems’ design, in order to help to improve Wikipedia articles’quality. At the same time, these conclusions can also be used under the background of other collaborative writing application to support group members collaborative activity to achieve better outcome.