The dynamic nature of conflict in Wikipedia

Abstract

The voluntary process of Wikipedia edition provides an environment where the outcome is clearly a collective product of interactions involving a large number of people. We propose a simple agent-based model, devel-oped from real data, to reproduce the collaborative process of Wikipedia edition. With a small number of simple ingredients, our model mimics several interesting features of real human behaviour, namely in the con-text of edit wars. We show that the level of conflict is determined by a tolerance parameter, which measures the editors ’ capability to accept dif-ferent opinions and to change their own opinion. We propose to measure conflict with a parameter based on mutual reverts, which increases only in contentious situations. Using this parameter, we find a distribution for the inter-peace periods that is heavy-tailed. The effects of wiki-robots in the conflict levels and in the edition patterns are also studied. Our find-ings are compared with previous parameters used to measure conflicts in edit wars.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.