Wikipediaas social network

Dan CosleyKicking the ball off for Ted

Welser, Gueorgi Kossinets, Vladimir Barash, Laura Black,

and a cast of thousands

Why? Comments on editing

Who, when

Downloadable!80M edits Nov 2006100M edits Jan 2007

What: contents of each revision

Edits aren’t just to articles. People discuss article creation in the “Talk namespace”. Each article potentially

has a corresponding talk page.

Article talk pages are conversational, covering questions of fact, of resolving

viewpoints, of sources, of policy.

Wikipedia is not just articles.Users have pages, and many engage in self-disclosure, via

text, “userboxes”, etc.

Users talk to each other too, on “User Talk” pages. This is a welcome I received long ago.

Users talk a lot

About articles About and with each other Encouragement Informal

communication

Larger-scale community structures also exist, and are represented as

pages in the “Wikipedia” namespace.

WikiProjects gather groups of like-minded people around a common

topic or kind of work (like copyediting)

Policies, roles, issues of quality, conflict resolution, and culture are

all represented explicitly.

A B

you

C

me

Where’s the social network?Indirectly, through

writing articles.

Or maybe B is a request for adminship, or a Wikiproject,

creating ties via group participation.

you

me

Wikipedia as a social network?

A

A’s talk

page

More directly, through talking about articles

me

My talk

page

Even more directly: user talk

you

Your talk

page

Many ways to think of building a network

Even more directly, through user-user

conversation.

Using the social network

…to increase participation (me)

…to study diffusion of ideas, memes (Ted Welser)

…to estimate article quality (Gueorgi Kossinets)

…to study policies and politics (Laura Black)

…to help predict project success (Connie Yuan)

…to order idea links v. social links (Vladimir Barash)