Viegas HICSS 2007
Summary
This article is a follow up on the authors' own study of 2003 [1]. In that study, they introduced History Flow, a visualization which shows contributions of different authors on collaboratively written documents as time passes, and used it to analyze contributions to various Wikipedia articles: "the relevance of authorship, the value of community surveillance in ameliorating antisocial behavior, and how authors with competing prespectives negotiate their differences." [1, p. 575] In this article, they extend their work by analyzing data from Wikipedia from 2005 with two aim: to find out what has changed about collaboration patterns in Wikipedia since 2003, and to analyze how "Talk" pages are used to coordinate edits to Wikipedia articles.
In terms of what had changed about collaboration patterns since 2003, the authors noted a decrease in edit wars: "long back-and-forth sequences of editors undoing each other's changes" (p. 3), possibly due to technology changes. The fast repair of vandalism evident in [1] was still evident in 2005, although the time between appearance of vandalism and repair increased.
The "Talk" pages are special pages associated with each Wikipedia entry on which editors and other contributors can discuss possible changes to the entry (among other things). 14.5% of the all articles in Wikipedia have "Talk" pages, while 94% of pages with more than 100 edits have them. "Talk" pages thus are associated with heavily edited articles. To see what how "Talk" pages are used by editors, the authors chose twenty-five pages (both highly controversial pages like "George W. Bush" and non-controversial pages like "Wave"), analyzed the conversations on the associated "Talk" pages and coded them according into categories they discovered from analyzing the "Talk" pages. They found that the posts to the "Talk" pages tended to be (in decreasing order of frequency): requests for editing coordination, requests for information (visitors associate editors of an article to be experts on that subject), and references to Wikipedia guidelines (typically in an attempt to re-focus discussion on editing, and cool tempers).
References
; ; ; "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualization", Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems, (2004) pp. 575-582.
