Observing Burstiness in Wikipedia Articles During New Disease Outbreaks

Observing Burstiness in Wikipedia Articles During New Disease Outbreaks - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2018, written by Reham Al Tamime, Richard Giordano and Wendy Hall.

Overview

Wikipedia can be conceptualized as an open sociotechnical environment that supports communities of humans and bots that update and contest information in Wikipedia articles. This environment affords a view to community or domain interactions and reactions to salient topics, such as disease outbreaks. But do reactions to different topics vary, and how can authors measure them? One widely-used approach when answering these questions is to delineate levels of burstiness-communication flows characterized by repeated bursts instead of a continuous stream-in the construction of a Wikipedia article. A literature review, however, reveals that current burstiness approaches do not fully support efforts to compare Wikipedia community reactions to different articles. Through an empirical analysis of the construction of Wikipedia health-related articles, authors both extend and refine burstiness as an analytical technique to understand the community dynamics underlying the construction of Wikipedia articles. Authors define a method by which authors can categorize burstiness as high medium and low. Authors empirical results suggest a proposed a model of burstiness.