TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding the signature of controversial Wikipedia articles through motifs in editor revision networks
AU - Ashford, James R.
AU - Preece, Alun
AU - Turner, Liam D.
AU - Felmlee, Diane
AU - Whitaker, Roger M.
AU - Towsley, Don
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence under Agreement Number W911NF-16-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Government, the U.K. Ministry of Defence or the U.K. Government. The U.S. and U.K. Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License.
PY - 2019/5/13
Y1 - 2019/5/13
N2 - Wikipedia serves as a good example of how editors collaborate to form and maintain an article. The relationship between editors, derived from their sequence of editing activity, results in a directed network structure called the revision network, that potentially holds valuable insights into editing activity. In this paper we create revision networks to assess differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, as labelled by Wikipedia. Originating from complex networks, we apply motif analysis, which determines the under or over-representation of induced sub-structures, in this case triads of editors. We analyse 21,631 Wikipedia articles in this way, and use principal component analysis to consider the relationship between their motif subgraph ratio profiles. Results show that a small number of induced triads play an important role in characterising relationships between editors, with controversial articles having a tendency to cluster. This provides useful insight into editing behaviour and interaction capturing counter-narratives, without recourse to semantic analysis. It also provides a potentially useful feature for future prediction of controversial Wikipedia articles.
AB - Wikipedia serves as a good example of how editors collaborate to form and maintain an article. The relationship between editors, derived from their sequence of editing activity, results in a directed network structure called the revision network, that potentially holds valuable insights into editing activity. In this paper we create revision networks to assess differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, as labelled by Wikipedia. Originating from complex networks, we apply motif analysis, which determines the under or over-representation of induced sub-structures, in this case triads of editors. We analyse 21,631 Wikipedia articles in this way, and use principal component analysis to consider the relationship between their motif subgraph ratio profiles. Results show that a small number of induced triads play an important role in characterising relationships between editors, with controversial articles having a tendency to cluster. This provides useful insight into editing behaviour and interaction capturing counter-narratives, without recourse to semantic analysis. It also provides a potentially useful feature for future prediction of controversial Wikipedia articles.
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U2 - 10.1145/3308560.3316754
DO - 10.1145/3308560.3316754
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85066916477
T3 - The Web Conference 2019 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
SP - 1180
EP - 1187
BT - The Web Conference 2019 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
Y2 - 13 May 2019 through 17 May 2019
ER -