Learning About the Quality of Teamwork from Wikiteams

This paper describes an approach to evaluating teams of contributors in Wikipedia based on social network analysis. We present the idea of creating an implicit social network based on characteristics of pages’ edit history and collaboration between contributors. This network consists of four dimensions: trust, distrust, acquaintance and knowledge. Trust and distrust are based on content modifications (copying and deleting respectively), acquaintance is based on the amount of discussion on articles’ talk pages between a given pair of authors and knowledge is based on the categories in which an author typically contributes. Our social network is based on the entire Wikipedia edit history, and therefore is a summary of all recorded author interactions. This social network can be used to assess the quality of a team of authors and consequently, to recommend good teams. The social network can also be used by Wikipedia authors and editors as an additional tool that allows to improve the author’s collaboration, as it expresses each author’s social environment and can be navigated to discover new projects that an author can participate in, or to recommend new collaborators.