The Dynamic Nature of Conflict in Wikipedia
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OFFPRINT The dynamic nature of conflict in Wikipedia Y. Gandica, F. Sampaio dos Aidos and J. Carvalho EPL, 108 (2014) 18003 Please visit the website www.epljournal.org Note that the author(s) has the following rights: – immediately after publication, to use all or part of the article without revision or modification, including the EPLA- formatted version, for personal compilations and use only; – no sooner than 12 months from the date of first publication, to include the accepted manuscript (all or part), but not the EPLA-formatted version, on institute repositories or third-party websites provided a link to the online EPL abstract or EPL homepage is included. For complete copyright details see: https://authors.epletters.net/documents/copyright.pdf. 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Carvalho Centre for Computational Physics, Department of Physics, University of Coimbra - 3004-516 Coimbra, Portugal received 29 April 2014; accepted in final form 16 September 2014 published online 7 October 2014 PACS 89.75.Fb – Structures and organization in complex systems PACS 05.65.+b – Self-organized systems PACS 89.20.Hh – World Wide Web, Internet Abstract – The voluntary process of Wikipedia edition provides an environment in which the outcome is clearly a collective product of interactions involving a large number of people. We propose a simple agent-based model, developed from real data, to reproduce the collaborative process of Wikipedia edition. With a small number of simple ingredients, our model mimics several interesting features of real human behaviour, namely in the context of edit wars. We show that the level of conflict is determined by a tolerance parameter, which measures the editors’ capability to accept different opinions and to change their own opinion. We propose to measure conflict with a parameter based on mutual reverts, which increases only in contentious situations. Using this parameter, we find a distribution for the inter-peace periods that is heavy tailed. The effects of wiki-robots in the conflict levels and in the edition patterns are also studied. Our findings are compared with previous parameters used to measure conflicts in edit wars. Copyright c EPLA, 2014 Introduction. – The study of interacting particle sys- For this endeavour, Internet data has played an tems has, for a long time, been an important subject of important role as a source of data that allows for the test physics. The use of statistical methods has allowed for ma- of models of universal social patterns as a collective effect jor advances in this area, by providing a bridge between of interaction among single individuals [9]. The develop- the microscopic interactions and the large collective be- ment of an article for Wikipedia (WP) is a process in which haviour of the system [1,2]. This success has motivated anybody may edit and change its content. Whatever the researchers to try a statistical approach to other subjects reasons behind someone’s decision to edit an article in WP, outside physics [3,4]. The application of the methods of and whatever his background and previous knowledge on statistical physics to social phenomena, where the inter- the article’s subject, it has been recognised that the reli- acting particles are now interacting human beings, has ability thus obtained is comparable to that of other high proved to be very fruitful in allowing for the understanding quality professional encyclopedias, such as the Encyclope- of many features of human behaviour [5–7]. Some of these dia Britannica [10]. This voluntary process clearly creates properties are common to very different phenomena in na- an environment where the outcome is a collective product ture. Scaling, for example, is generally observed in a great of interactions among a large number of people [11–13]. variety of human networks. Universality, which states that The on-line availability of the historical record of all edi- the emergent phenomena displayed by the collective be- tions has promoted an intense research activity [14–16], haviour of interacting particles depends on symmetries, trying to grasp the intrinsic behaviour that characterises dimensionality and conservation laws and not on the mi- several features of WP editing. croscopic details of the intrinsic dynamics mechanism [2,8], The emergence and development of conflicts in WP is seems to be present in many social situations [5–7]. In this one of the features that has recently received attention sense, the cornerstone to the successful modelling of social from the academic world. The interplay between strong systems depends mainly on two major strategies: on the convictions and tolerance leads to conflicts among the ed- one hand an appropriate selection of the relevant variables itors (the so-called edit wars) and the WP article may and, on the other, a good visualisation/representation of converge (or not) into a consensus edition [17]. Several the displayed phenomena, both related to the specific sys- approaches to measure the level of conflict in an article as tem being studied. it develops have been tried. Some take into account the 18003-p1 Y. Gandica et al. resulting topology, for example on semantic flow [18] or on talk pages [19], missing the underlying dynamical pro- cess. Other approaches determine conflict levels by focus- ing on WP editors’ dynamical behaviour, by measuring, for example, the talk page length [20–22]. The drawback of these approaches, besides the time-consuming effort needed to apply the methodologies, is that the use of this editing channel, that was created to discuss changes Fig. 1: (Colour on-line) Examples of editor’s activity as a func- and controversies, depends on cultural traits. In some tion of edition number, (a) in blue for a low, (b) in green for a cultures, the talk pages are extensively used to discuss medium and (c) in brown for a high controversy page. On the the differences of opinion, while in others they are al- vertical axis each editor is numbered according to the chrono- most not used at all for this purpose [23]. The search for logical order of his debut in that article. culture-independent indicators led to the study of disputes between pairs of editors by measuring, for example, the number of words that they have deleted from each other in WP, containing 4.64 million pages, available at the a sequence of editions [17,24]. These and other appropriate WikiWarMonitor webpage (http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/).