Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Review of "It’s a Network, Not an Encyclopedia: A Social Network Perspective on Wikipedia Collaboration"

This paper investigates the relationship between Wikipedia article's centrality (degree and eigenvector centrality) and articles quality, sampling 300 articles (out of 15000) from the Wikiproject Medicine, and studying a 300x1800 two-mode network (articles by editors, where nodes are articles and ties are the number of editors who contributed to each pair of articles).

The dependent variable is article's quality (on a 5-point Likert scale, assigned by the Wikipedia community), and the independent variables are degree centrality and eigenvector centrality; moreover the author considered a set of control variables, related to topic importance, popularity of articles and other measures of direct collaboration.

In general, the results indicate that articles' centrality is positively correlated to articles' quality.

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