Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia

DeDeo, Simon

doi:10.15346/hc.v1i1.2

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Wikipedia's norms for editor interaction are "highly conservative" and long-lived in comparison to most other online communities [35]. Today, much authority on the site remains grounded in a small network of policies shaped early in the site's history [8], written originally in response to a period of heavy growth and necessary crowd control. Some of the earliest policies, like Notability (N), Verifiability (V), and No Original Research (NOR, see Figure 1) originated many years ago but continue to dominate editorial discussion and drive group decision-making, while newer rules remain comparatively obscure [27].…”

Section: Background On Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Wikipedia Deletion Debates with a Group Decision-Making Forecast Model

Mayfield

Black

2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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In this work we show that machine learning with natural language processing can accurately forecast the outcomes of group decision-making in online discussions. Specifically, we study Articles for Deletion, a Wikipedia forum for determining which content should be included on the site. Applying this model, we replicate several findings from prior work on the factors that predict debate outcomes; we then extend this prior work and present new avenues for study, particularly in the use of policy citation during discussion. Alongside these findings, we introduce a structured corpus and source code for analyzing over 400,000 deletion debates spanning Wikipedia's history, enabling future large-scale studies of group decision-making discourse. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning; • Information systems → World Wide Web.

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Section: Background On Wikipediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing Wikipedia Deletion Debates with a Group Decision-Making Forecast Model

Mayfield

Black

2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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“…[68] constructed a game-theoretic model to back-infer the underlying beliefs and desires of the users from their behavior alone. In the spirit of earlier work in inductive game theory [70,71], our fundamental goal was to understand the cognitive complexity of the individuals, and how they reacted to the contexts in which they found themselves.…”

Section: Broken Windows and The Normative Pathwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ref. [68] found that norm-conformity accumulates faster when individuals interact (α driven towards one), suggesting that reputation drives learning. A "cheap-talk" result-norm-conformity is not affected by use of associated discussion pagesfurther complicates the analysis.…”

Section: Broken Windows and The Normative Pathwaymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The law appears robust to a wide range of filters, including the inclusion of partial reverts and the restriction to harder conflicts, where we track conflict by a double-revert, i.e., measure the probability of two reverts in a row. The observed timescales of these runs are short, often only hours or even minutes long, requiring us to refer to intrinsic features of the interaction rather than events in the real world, and involve many users, making these interactions intrinsically social, rather than pairwise [68].7 Drawn from pages current as of 1 April 2015; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reverting; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit warring. …”

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confidence: 99%

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Major Transitions in Political Order

DeDeo

2017

From Matter to Life

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We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group. At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life itself.[T]hey then threw me upon the bed, and one of them (I think it was Mary Smith) kneeled on my breast, and with one hand held my throat; Mary Junque felt for my money; by my struggling about, they did not get it at that time; then they called another woman in . . . when she came in, they said cut him! cut him! -evidence of Benjamin Leethorp in the trial of Mary Junque and Mary Smith for grand larceny, Old Bailey Criminal Court, London, England; 4 April 1779 [1] Unless we are historians, the 18th Century world of Junque, Smith and Leethorp is almost impossible to imagine. In stealing from Leethorp, the two women put themselves at risk not only of imprisonment, but of indentured servitude in the colonies and even death. Leethorp, for his part, begins his evidence by explaining to the jury how he was seeking a different brothel than the one in which he was throttled, stripped, and robbed. Junque and Smith were without benefit of legal counsel and Smith's witnesses, unaware of the trial date, did not appear. The court condemned them to branding and a year's imprisonment in less than five hundred words. The indictment, formally for a non-violent offence, was one of hundreds of its kind that decade marked by assault, knives, and (sometimes) freely flowing blood.In the risks they ran and the things they were ashamed of, the minds of the three are alien to us; in its casual violence, so was the society that enclosed them. Yet this world, gradually, continuously, evolved into one far less tolerant of violence and yet far more protective of an individual's rights-into the world, in other words, of most readers of this volume. How witnesses, victims, and defendants spoke about both facts and norms in the law courts of London shifted, decade by decade, over the course of a hundred and fifty years [2]. This shift in speech paralleled a similar decline in how people behaved towards each other on the street, as the state came, increasingly, to manage its monopoly on violence-part of what is known as the "civilizing process" [3].These changes took place in the decentralized common-law courts, among hundreds of thousands of interacting victims and defendants. Acts of Parliament, sensational crimes, the invention of the criminal defence lawyer-these changed ...

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“…We define a revert as an edit that takes the page to a previously-seen state (as detected by the MD5 page hash provided by the Wikipedia API), but exclude the relatively small number of cases where a user's revert only undoes work contributed by that user herself (i.e., we exclude self-reverts). More details on these methods, and additional robustness checks, are described in [16].…”

Section: Tracking Conflict Through Page Revertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: A Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

DeDeo

2016

Future Internet

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Abstract:What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase, and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the system to a critical point between them.

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Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia

Cited by 13 publications

References 60 publications

Analyzing Wikipedia Deletion Debates with a Group Decision-Making Forecast Model

Analyzing Wikipedia Deletion Debates with a Group Decision-Making Forecast Model

Major Transitions in Political Order

Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: A Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions

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