Lerner Jürgen, Lomi Alessandro
1Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, Konstanz, 78464 Germany.
2Faculty of Economics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Via Buffi 13, Lugano, 6904 Switzerland.
Appl Netw Sci. 2017;2(1):24. doi: 10.1007/s41109-017-0043-2. Epub 2017 Jul 27.
Wikipedia articles are written by teams of independent volunteers in the absence of formal hierarchical organizational structures. How is coordination achieved under such conditions of extreme decentralization? Building on studies on the organization of dominance relations in animal and human societies, we theorize that coordination in Wikipedia is made possible by an emergent hierarchical order sustained by self-organizing sequences of text editing events. We propose a new method to turn the editing history of Wikipedia pages into an evolving multiplex network resulting from three types of interaction events: dyadic undo, dyadic redo, and third-party based edit events. We develop new relational event models for signed networks that specify how the probability of observing various types of edit events depends on their embeddedness in sequences of past edit events. Using a random sample of page histories comprising 12,719 revisions produced by 7,657 unique users, we examine the relation between theoretically defined sequences of text editing events, and the emergence of linear dominance hierarchies that regulate production relations within Wikipedia. We find evidence that dyadic interaction gives rise to systematic extra-dyadic dependence structures that are partially consistent with a hierarchical interpretation of the Wikipedia editing network. We support and complement the statistical analysis of multiplex event networks with data visualizations that provide qualitative validation of our main results.
维基百科文章由独立志愿者团队撰写，不存在正式的层级组织结构。在这种极端去中心化的情况下，如何实现协调呢？基于对动物和人类社会中支配关系组织的研究，我们提出理论，认为维基百科中的协调是由文本编辑事件的自组织序列所维持的一种新兴层级秩序实现的。我们提出一种新方法，将维基百科页面的编辑历史转化为由三种交互事件产生的不断演化的多重网络：二元撤销、二元重做和基于第三方的编辑事件。我们为带符号网络开发新的关系事件模型，该模型规定了观察各种类型编辑事件的概率如何取决于它们在过去编辑事件序列中的嵌入情况。我们使用由7657个唯一用户产生的12719次修订组成的页面历史随机样本，研究理论上定义的文本编辑事件序列与调节维基百科内生产关系的线性支配层级的出现之间的关系。我们发现有证据表明，二元交互会产生系统的超二元依赖结构，这与对维基百科编辑网络的层级解释部分一致。我们用数据可视化来支持和补充对多重事件网络的统计分析，这些可视化提供了对我们主要结果的定性验证。
