On the Relation of Edit Behavior, Link Structure, and Article Quality on Wikipedia

摘要

When editing articles on Wikipedia, arguments between editors frequently occur. These conflicts occasionally lead to destructive behavior and diminish article quality. Currently, the relation between editing behavior, link structure, and article quality is not well-understood in our community, notwithstanding that this relation may facilitate editing processes and article quality on Wikipedia. To shed light on this complex relation, we classify edits for 13,045 articles and perform an in-depth analysis of a 4,800 article subsample. Additionally, we build a network of wikilinks (internal Wikipedia hyperlinks) between articles. Using this data, we compute parsimonious metrics to quantify editing and linking behavior. Our analysis unveils that controversial articles differ considerably from others for almost all metrics, while slight trends are also detectable for higher-quality articles. With our work, we assist online collaboration communities, especially Wikipedia, in long-term improvement of article quality by identifying deviant behavior via simple sequence-based edit and network-based article metrics.