When the Wikipedians Talk: Network and Tree Structure of Wikipedia Discussion Pages

Presented at: ICWSM 2011: Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, July 17-21, 2011, Barcelona, Spain.

By David Laniado, Riccardo Tasso, Yana Volkovich and Andreas Kaltenbrunner

Abstract

Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversations. An analysis of the tree structure of the article talk pages allows to capture patterns of interaction, and reveals structural differences among the discussions about articles from different semantic areas.

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Presentation slides

Wikipedia Signpost, July 25th, 2011: [1]