Odysseus

One of the more disruptive developments in Web2.0 is Wikipedia. Advocates of Wikipedia claim that it captures the wisdom of crowds to produce an encyclopedia that is as authoritative as the established encyclopedias. This claim is hugely controversial and there have been many criticisms of the quality of Wikipedia content - see Korfiatis et al. for references. This divergence of
opinion is not surprising as our experience with Wikipedia varies. It can be very valuable as a scientific reference on topics for which there is a single answer, on the other hand it can be unreliable on controversial issues. The open nature of Wikipedia makes it susceptible to vandalism, see for instance the entry on Steve_Staunton Staunton from October 2007. Also, the ʻmany eyeballsʼ argument on which much of the case for Wikipedia quality is based does not work well for items of minor interest.

The objective of this project is to explore the use of network motifs as a mechanism to score the authoritativeness of Wikipedia entries (see Figure 1). The basic idea is that articles with contributions from authors who have also contributed elsewhere are likely to be authoritative while articles from loner contributors are less reliable. We expect that there will also be temporal update motifs that are characteristic of poor quality on Wikipedia. To help with the identification of useful motifs, the collection of Featured Content in Wikipedia will be a good starting point.

Outcomes:
• A review of existing research on authoritativeness and quality in Wikipedia.
• A manual analysis of network motifs on good and bad Wikipedia articles.
• A web scrape of Wikipedia articles in order to conduct an valuation.
• An evaluation to assess whether putative motifs are predictive of good and bad Wikipedia content.
• A presentation on the details of the data collected and the research findings.
The project will touch on one of the core areas examined by the Clique Research Cluster: identifying anomalous structure in network data. The student will collaborate with other postdocs and PhD students working in this area.