Network analysis of collaboration structure in Wikipedia

In this paper we give models and algorithms to describe and analyze the collaboration among authors of Wikipedia from a network analytical perspective.The edit network encodes who interacts how with whom when editing an article; it significantly extends previous network models that code author communities in Wikipedia.Several characteristics summarizing some aspects of the organization process and allowing the analyst to identify certain types of authors can be obtained from the edit network.Moreover, we propose several indicators characterizing the global network structure and methods to visualize edit networks.It is shown that the structural network indicators are correlated with quality labels of the associated Wikipedia articles.