Invasion Biology and the Success of Social Collaboration Networks, with Application to Wikipedia

Invasion Biology and the Success of Social Collaboration Networks, with Application to Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2013, written by Marc Mangel, William H. Satterthwaite, Peter Pirolli, B. Suh and Y. Zhang.

Overview

Authors adapt methods from the stochastic theory of invasions – for which a key question is whether a propagule will grow to an established population or fail – to show how monitoring early participation in a social collaboration network allows prediction of success. Social collaboration networks have become ubiquitous and can now be found in widely diverse situations. However, there are currently no methods to predict whether a social collaboration network will succeed or not, where success is defined as growing to a specified number of active participants before falling to zero active participants. Authors illustrate a suitable methodology with Wikipedia. In general, wikis are web-based software that allows collaborative efforts in which all viewers of a page can edit its contents online, thus encouraging cooperative efforts on text and hypertext. The English language Wikipedia is one of the most spectacular successes, but not all wikis succeed and there have been some major failures. Using these new methods, authors ...