Social networks of Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, is a live social experiment: millions of individuals volunteer their knowledge and time to collective create it. It is hence interesting trying to understand how they do it. While most of the scholar attention focused on article pages, a less investigated share of activities happen on user talk pages, Wikipedia pages where a message can be left for the specific user. This public conversations can be studied from a Social Network Analysis perspective in order to highlight the structure of the "talk" network. In this paper we focus on this preliminary extraction step by proposing different algorithms. We then empirically validate the differences in the networks they generate on the Venetian Wikipedia with the real network of conversations extracted manually by coding every message left on all user talk pages. The comparisons show that both the algorithms and the manual process contain inaccuracies that are intrinsic in the freedom and unpredictability of Wikipedia syntax and practices. Nevertheless, a precise description of the involved issues allows to make informed decisions and to base empirical findings on reproducible evidence. Our goal is to lay the foundation for a solid computational sociology of wikis. For this reason we release the scripts encoding our algorithms as open source and also some datasets extracted out of Wikipedia conversations, in order to let other researchers replicate and improve our initial effort.