Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 6: Focus Session: Big Data (Contributed Talks)

SOE 6.4: Talk

Monday, March 26, 2012, 18:00–18:15, HE 101

Who writes Wikipedia, a data-driven modeling of Wikipedia editorial activity — •Taha Yasseri, Róbert Sumi, and János Kertész — Institute of Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

Recently developed Internet-based technologies facilitate collective cooperation of individuals more than ever. Among all possible examples, Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia written by unknown volunteers from all around the world, is the one, in which self-organised value formation occurs with no external supervision or guidance. Moreover, similar to other online societies, the complete set of information about the activity of individuals is digitalised and collected in an easily accessible way, so that statistically analysing this big data corpus is achievable now.

In this contribution, we report on our recent investigations [1] on the accumulated data of the activity of Wikipedia editors in 34 languages (more than 1 billion records from more than 25 million editors), (i) to observe and evaluate the universalities and differences among various societies of editors and, (ii) to have an estimation of the geographical distribution of editors in the globe, based on the data-driven model for editor activities. We believe such studies could shed light to unknown aspects of the Wikipedia development process, its biases and limitations.

[1] T. Yasseri, R. Sumi and J. Kertész, Circadian patterns of Wikipedia editorial activity: A demographic analysis, to appear in PLoS ONE, pre-print: arXiv/1109.1746.