Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms

Abstract

Abstract. To investigate how participants in peer production systems allocate their time, we examine editing activity on Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. To analyze the huge edit histories of the site's administrators we introduce a visualization technique, the chromogram, that can display very long textual sequences through a simple color coding scheme. Using chromograms we describe a set of characteristic editing patterns. In addition to confirming known patterns, such reacting to vandalism events, we identify a distinct class of organized systematic activities. We discuss how both reactive and systematic strategies shed light on self-allocation of effort in Wikipedia, and how they may pertain to other peer-production systems.

WIScking Ideas

“…With its accessibility and popularity, Wikipedia is often the first and last source of information for the plugged-in public. Even if the widely repeated-though, according to Viégas et al (2007), "naive"-understanding of Wikipedia's unreliability were true, its utility, ubiquity, and openness make it a uniquely influential source for the transmission, reproduction, and formation of ideas.…”

Impression formation in online peer production

“…This is an example of the "detail edit log" of Wikipedia editor behavior from the WikiDashboard tool (Suh et al, 2008). of Wikipedia edits over time (Wattenberg, Viégas, & Hollenbach, 2007). The design of these visualizations make tradeoffs in terms of how much information they show in what format, and as a result how they influence decision-making and performance.…”

Handbook of Technical Communication

“…Any account of technical communication has to consider this social dimension (cf. Zerubavel, 2003) -otherwise it fails to clarify the peculiarities of technological enhancements of, say, collaborative writing as currently provided by wiki-based systems (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001;Stegbauer, 2009 (Wattenberg, Viégas, and Hollenbach, 2007;Laniado, Tasso, Volkovich, and Kaltenbrunner, 2011;Gómez, Kappen, and Kaltenbrunner, 2011) (Mehler and Sutter, 2008)) to collaborative writing and edit wars (where articles are authored by many authors in the role of content providers, removers or defenders (Brandes, Kenis, Lerner, and Raaij, 2009) (Sager, 1997). They also allow for suspending the time-space continuity of faceto-face communication (Zerubavel, 2003) in terms of multilogues.…”