The Third Man: hierarchy formation in Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia articles are written by teams of independent volunteers in the absence of formal hierarchical organizational structures. How is coordination achieved under such conditions of extreme decentralization? Building on studies on the organization of dominance relations in animal and human societies, we theorize that coordination in Wikipedia is made possible by an emergent hierarchical order sustained by self-organizing sequences of text editing events. We propose a new method to turn the editing history of Wikipedia pages into an evolving multiplex network resulting from three types of interaction events: dyadic undo, dyadic redo, and third-party based edit events. We develop new relational event models for signed networks that specify how the probability of observing various types of edit events depends on their embeddedness in sequences of past edit events. Using a random sample of page histories comprising 12,719 revisions produced by 7,657 unique users, we examine the relation between theoretically defined sequences of text editing events, and the emergence of linear dominance hierarchies that regulate production relations within Wikipedia. We find evidence that dyadic interaction gives rise to systematic extra-dyadic dependence structures that are partially consistent with a hierarchical interpretation of the Wikipedia editing network. We support and complement the statistical analysis of multiplex event networks with data visualizations that provide qualitative validation of our main results.

The Network Structure of Successful Collaboration in Wikipedia

“…Undoing contributions of others is interpreted as a negative interaction among users and re-doing others' contributions is interpreted as a positive interaction. Analyzing fine-grained text-change events obtained by comparing successive revisions of the same article is a well established strategy in Wikipedia research and yields more detailed information than considering just complete reverts that restore exactly a previous version of the text [16,7,17,30,31,6].…”

“…We model the propensity of specific users to undo contributions of specific other users by variants of relational event models that have been proposed in [6]. Relational event models [32] are a family of statistical models to analyze networks of social interaction defined in terms of dyadic, time-stamped events observed in continuous time, such as persons sending emails to others -or Wikipedia users undoing contributions of other users.…”

“…These decisions to undo or redo contributions of other users are of utmost importance since they ultimately determine the article's content and quality. Previous work has shown that these decisions can be partially explained by the embedding of users in the network of past events [6]. In this paper we develop and test two hypotheses about how the network structure of collaboration underlying the production of higher-quality articles may differ from that underlying the production of lower-quality articles.…”

“…In the near-absence of centralized, authority-based organizational coordination and control routines, it has been argued that emergent networks resulting from task-oriented interaction might serve the purpose of coordinating and controlling the execution of team work [6]. If this claim is correct, then differences in the structure of these collaboration networks should be reflected in observable differences in the quality of the articles in Wikipedia.…”

“…The structure of the edit network of a Wikipedia article emerges from sequences of time-stamped, signed and weighted relational events [6]. A negative undo event results from edits in which a user deletes (at least part of) the contributions of another user.…”