Understanding the signature of controversial Wikipedia articles through motifs in editor revision networks

Ashford, James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2678-577X, Turner, Liam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4877-5289, Whitaker, Roger ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8473-1913, Preece, Alun ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0349-9057, Felmlee, Diana and Towsley, Don 2019. Understanding the signature of controversial Wikipedia articles through motifs in editor revision networks. Presented at: The Web Conference 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA, 13-17 May 2019.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics Crime and Security Research Institute (CSURI)
Funders:	DAIS-ITA
Related URLs:	Organisation
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 May 2019
Last Modified:	26 Jun 2024 01:06
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/121788

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