Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 20: Networks III

DY 20.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 16:00–16:15, MA 004

Information spread via on-line networks: from time series to co-evolving functional networks — •Jan W. Kantelhardt¹, Mirko Kämpf¹, Shlomo Havlin², and Lev Muchnik³ — ¹Institut für Physik, Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle/Saale, Germany — ²Physics Department, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel — ³Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, USA

Human interaction and information spread via on-line networks is becoming increasingly important for our contemporary technological society. Here, we characterize and compare three organizational and dynamical network structures associated with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We study (i) the network of the direct links between Wikipedia articles of various languages, (ii) the usage network as determined from cross-correlations between click-count time series of many pairs of articles, and (iii) the edit network as determined from co-incident edit events. The major goal is to find correlations between components of these three networks that characterize the dynamics of information spread in the complex system. We find that even though the dynamics of article click and edit time series are characteristically different - download activity is characterised by strongly persistent fluctuations (scaling exponent α ≈ 0.9), while edit activity is only short-term correlated - there are indications of a co-evolution of the corresponding dynamic networks. The results help in understanding the complex process of collecting, processing, validating, and distributing information in self-organised social networks.