Diomidis Spinellis (author of the well-known book Code Reading) and
Panagiotis Louridas, both of AUEB, published "the collaborative
organization of knowledge: why Wikipedia's growth is sustainable" with
DOI:10.1145/1378704.1378720 in CACM:51-8 (Aug 2008),
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1378704.1378720
The two researchers, whose project was partially funded by the European
Commission, found that before an article is created it usually already
has incoming links, in the form of [[red links]]. Most articles get
written within a month after the first red link. Furthermore, incoming
links increase exponentially until the article is written, thus making
the links blue, at which time the increase becomes linear. Articles are
usually created by a different Wikipedian than the contributor who
inserted the first red link to it.
I infer that Wikipedians use red links as a way to communicate with one
another about which articles should be written first. The MediaWiki
software also includes the MostWanted special page in which it counts
how many incoming red links each article has. Wikipedia also has the
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] page.
I regard the use of the red links for identifying articles most needed
to be written as an example of communication through stigmergy in
Wikipedia. I am, however, somewhat concerned about whether most
Wikipedians prefer to get this information from the articles themselves
or from the MostWanted MediaWiki/Wikipedia features, and whether this
could affect the stigmergic nature of the communication. I feel that
they probably get this information from the articles themselves
spontaneously, and in that case it very much looks like stigmergy; but
if they get the information from the centralised MostWanted page, is it
still stigmergy? I would think yes, albeit the stigmergic nature of the
communication may appear to be somewhat more weak than in the other
case. What do other subscribers in the wiki-research-l mailing list
think?
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis,
http://nsk.karastathis.org/