Visualizing Large-Scale Human Collaboration in Wikipedia

Visualizing Large-Scale Human Collaboration in Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2014, written by Robert P. Biuk-Aghai, Cheong-Iao Pang and Yain-Whar Si.

Overview

Volunteer-driven large-scale human-to-human collaboration has become common in the Web 2.0 era. Wikipedia is one of the foremost examples of such large-scale collaboration, involving millions of authors writing millions of articles on a wide range of subjects. The collaboration on some popular articles numbers hundreds or even thousands of co-authors. Authors have analyzed the co-authoring across entire Wikipedias in different languages and have found it to follow a geometric distribution in all the language editions authors studied. In order to better understand the distribution of co-author counts across different topics, authors have aggregated content by category and visualized it in a form resembling a geographic map. The visualizations produced show that there are significant differences of co-author counts across different topics in all the Wikipedia language editions authors visualized. In this article authors describe analysis and visualization method and present the results of applying method to the English, German, Chinese, Swedish and Danish Wikipedias. Authors have evaluated visualization against textual data and found it to be superior in usability, accuracy, speed and user preference.