No Arabic abstract
A number of human activities exhibit a bursty pattern, namely periods of very high activity that are followed by rest periods. Records of this process generate time series of events whose inter-event times follow a probability distribution that displays a fat tail. The grounds for such phenomenon are not yet clearly understood. In the present work we use the freely available Wikipedias editing records to tackle this question by measuring the level of burstiness, as well as the memory effect of the editing tasks performed by different editors in different pages. Our main finding is that, even though the editing activity is conditioned by the circadian 24 hour cycle, the conditional probability of an activity of a given duration at a given time of the day is independent from the latter. This suggests that the human activity seems to be related to the high cost of starting an action as opposed to the much lower cost of continuing that action.
In this work, we are interested in the inner-cultural background shaping broad peoples preferences. Our interest is also to track this human footprint, as it has the tendency to disappear due to the nowadays globalization. Given that language is a social construction, it is part of the historical reservoir, shaping the cultural (and hence collective) identity, then helping the community to archive accumulated knowledge about its culture and identity. We assume that the collective interest of a language-speaking community to document their events, people and any feature important for them, by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, can act as a footprint of the whole groups collective identity. The analysis of the languages preferences into categories among several languages, could have also applications into the field of Multilingual Natural Language Processing (MNLP). We, then, report results about the number of edits, editors, and pages into categories, displayed by the several languages. Results are shown by several angles, and some extra measures complement the analysis.
Current models for opinion dynamics typically utilize a Poisson process for speaker selection, making the waiting time between events exponentially distributed. Human interaction tends to be bursty, though, having higher probabilities of either extremely short waiting times or long periods of silence. To quantify the burstiness effects on the dynamics of social models, we place in competition two groups exhibiting different speakers waiting-time distributions. These competitions are implemented in the binary Naming Game, and show that the relevant aspect of the waiting-time distribution is the density of the head rather than that of the tail. We show that even with identical mean waiting times, a group with a higher density of short waiting times is favored in competition over the other group. This effect remains in the presence of nodes holding a single opinion that never changes, as the fraction of such committed individuals necessary for achieving consensus decreases dramatically when they have a higher head density than the holders of the competing opinion. Finally, to quantify differences in burstiness, we introduce the expected number of small-time activations and use it to characterize the early-time regime of the system.
This report summarizes the results of a short-term student research project focused on the usage of Swedish Wikipedia. It is trying to answer the following question: To what extent (and why) do people from non-English language communities use the English Wikipedia instead of the one in their local language? Article access time series and article edit time series from major Wikipedias including Swedish Wikipedia are analyzed with various tools.
Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia with an enormous amount of content. This encyclopedia is written by volunteers with various backgrounds in a collective fashion; anyone can access and edit most of the articles. This open-editing nature may give us prejudice that Wikipedia is an unstable and unreliable source; yet many studies suggest that Wikipedia is even more accurate and self-consistent than traditional encyclopedias. Scholars have attempted to understand such extraordinary credibility, but usually used the number of edits as the unit of time, without consideration of real time. In this work, we probe the formation of such collective intelligence through a systematic analysis using the entire history of 34,534,110 English Wikipedia articles, between 2001 and 2014. From this massive data set, we observe the universality of both timewise and lengthwise editing scales, which suggests that it is essential to consider the real-time dynamics. By considering real time, we find the existence of distinct growth patterns that are unobserved by utilizing the number of edits as the unit of time. To account for these results, we present a mechanistic model that adopts the article editing dynamics based on both editor-editor and editor-article interactions. The model successfully generates the key properties of real Wikipedia articles such as distinct types of articles for the editing patterns characterized by the interrelationship between the numbers of edits and editors, and the article size. In addition, the model indicates that infrequently referred articles tend to grow faster than frequently referred ones, and articles attracting a high motivation to edit counterintuitively reduce the number of participants. We suggest that this decay of participants eventually brings inequality among the editors, which will become more severe with time.
We perform an in-depth analysis on the inequality in 863 Wikimedia projects. We take the complete editing history of 267,304,095 Wikimedia items until 2016, which not only covers every language edition of Wikipedia, but also embraces the comple