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Finding social roles in Wikipedia

Published: 08 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential "structural signatures" that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month's cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
iConference '11: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
February 2011
858 pages
ISBN:9781450301213
DOI:10.1145/1940761
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. Wikipedia
  2. online community
  3. social networks
  4. social roles
  5. structural signatures

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iConference '11
iConference '11: iConference 2011
February 8 - 11, 2011
Washington, Seattle, USA

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  • (2024)Synews: a synergy-based rumor verification systemSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-024-01214-z14:1Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
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