Characterizing Wikipedia pages using edit network motif profiles

Abstract

Good Wikipedia articles are authoritative sources due to the collaboration of a number of knowledgeable contributors. This is the many eyes idea. The edit network associated with a Wikipedia article can tell us something about its quality or authoritativeness. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the characteristics of this edit network are predictive of the quality of the corresponding article's content. We characterize the edit network using a profile of network motifs and we show that this network motif profile is predictive of the Wikipedia quality classes assigned to articles by Wikipedia editors. We further show that the network motif profile can identify outlier articles particularly in the 'Featured Article' class, the highest Wikipedia quality class.