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?
On Sunday 12 October 2008, nsk wrote:
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?
I think this question would require a very clear understanding/definition of stigmergy, and how it is differentiated from communication. On p.53 of my dissertation I noted:
[[ Stigmergy is a term coined by Pierre-Paul Grasse to describe how wasps and termites collectively build complex structures; as Istvan Karsai (2004, p. 101) writes, it “describes the situation in which the product of previous work, rather than direct communication among builders, induces [and directs how] the wasps perform additional labor.” In addition to my proposal that this notion might be helpful in understanding Wikipedia collaboration (Reagle, 2005b), Mark Elliott (2006) has also, more thoroughly, argued the same: “As stigmergy is a method of communication in which individuals communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. . . the concept of stigmergy therefore provides an intuitive and easy-to-grasp theory for helping understand how disparate, distributed, ad hoc contributions could lead to the emergence of the largest collaborative enterprises the world has seen” (p. 4). ]]
So then the question becomes what constitutes "direct" communication versus environmental modification in the wiki context.
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:42 AM, nsk nsk@karastathis.org wrote: [snip]
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
[snip]
I would expect, but do not have data to support:
That at any time there is small subset of highly active users who actively use the "MostWanted" features and are personally responsible for a highly disproportionate number of new articles. I also expect that there is a much larger group of editors who learn of needed pages by discovering red-links during their own quasi-random exploration and do not use the MostWanted feature at all. Finally, I expect that while members of this latter group make far fewer articles individually the large size of this group results in the contribution being very large.
To study this further you could explore the page hit counts for the mostwantedpage features and compare that to article creation. You could also explore how "wanted" a page becomes before it is created: I would expect (but again, do not have data to support) that many pages are created long before they have enough accumulated want to earn a visible position on any of the mostwanted pages lists. (i.e. mostwanted is not going to have much effect on pages until they have a rather large amount of want).
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I would expect, but do not have data to support:
That at any time there is small subset of highly active users who actively use the "MostWanted" features and are personally responsible for a highly disproportionate number of new articles. I also expect that there is a much larger group of editors who learn of needed pages by discovering red-links during their own quasi-random exploration and do not use the MostWanted feature at all.
I agree. There's a corpus of established editors creating many 'wanted articles', plus a large base of viewers which occasionally create an article from a red link they see. Then, you have usual editors which create an article from a red link because they found it when viewing another page, not because they searched on Special:MostWanted.
I do not dare to estimate whom is creating more articles, though.
An interesting point I often see as an admin is how, when a page has been deleted many times (by being created with gibberish), it always has some incoming links.
It is a variant of the proposed case, as the users aren't creating good content, but they're reading and following the red link enough (here they aren't using wantedpages) to make the vandalising noise noticeable. And leave the admin wondering how, having only a few incoming links (sometimes even just one!) so much people went ahead and created it with nothing to say.
Thus, I expect that good creations by random people finding a red link follow a similar pattern.
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