Abstract
Building a shared understanding of a specific area of interest is of increasing importance in today’s information-centric world. A shared understanding of a domain can be realized by building a structured knowledge base about it collaboratively. Our research is driven by the goal to understand participation patterns over time in collaborative knowledge building efforts. Consequently, we focus our study on one representative project – Wikidata. Wikidata is a free, structured knowledge base that provides structured data to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This paper builds upon previous research, where we identified six common participation patterns, i.e. roles, in Wikidata. In the research presented here, we study the applicability of sequence analysis methods by analyzing the dynamics in users’ participation patterns. The sequence analysis is judged by its ability to answer three questions: (i) “Are there any preferable role transitions in Wikidata?”; (ii) “What are the dominant dynamic participation patterns?”; (iii) “Are users who join earlier more turbulent contributors?” Our data set includes participation patterns of about 20,000 users in each month from October 2012 to October 2014. We show that sequence analysis methods are able to infer interesting role transitions in Wikidata, find dominant dynamic participation patterns, and make statistical inferences. Finally, we also discuss the significance of these results with respect to the understanding of the participation process in Wikidata.
Keywords
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Wikidata is organized into namespaces. Each namespace contains a specific kind of artifacts. Property namespace, for example, groups all Wikidata’s pages about properties whereas the main namespace comprises all the items.
- 3.
The monthly period of time has been chosen to determine stable patterns of participation with fewer fluctuations than seen in weekly periods of time.
References
Abbott, A., Tsay, A.: Sequence analysis and optimal matching methods in sociology review and prospect. Sociol. Methods Res. 29(1), 3–33 (2000)
Elzinga, C.H., Liefbroer, A.C.: De-standardization of family-life trajectories of young adults: a cross-national comparison using sequence analysis. European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie 23(3), 225–250 (2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10680-007-9133-7
Gabadinho, A., Ritschard, G., Mueller, N.S., Studer, M.: Analyzing and visualizing state sequences in R with traminer. J. Stat. Softw. 40(4), 1–37 (2011)
Gabadinho, A., Ritschard, G., Studer, M., Müller, N.S.: Extracting and rendering representative sequences. In: Fred, A., Dietz, J.L.G., Liu, K., Filipe, J. (eds.) IC3K 2009. CCIS, vol. 128, pp. 94–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19032-2_7
Gleave, E., Welser, H.T., Lento, T.M., Smith, M.A.: A conceptual and operational definition of’social role in online community. In: 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2009, pp. 1–11. IEEE (2009)
Keegan, B.C., Lev, S., Arazy, O.: Analyzing organizational routines in online knowledge collaborations: a case for sequence analysis in CSCW. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04819 (2015)
Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B.A., Chi, E.H.: He says, she says: conflict and coordination in wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 453–462. ACM (2007)
Krötzsch, M., Vrandečić, D., Völkel, M., Haller, H., Studer, R.: Semantic wikipedia. Web Seman. Sci. Serv. Agents World Wide Web 5(4), 251–261 (2007)
McVicar, D., Anyadike-Danes, M.: Predicting successful and unsuccessful transitions from school to work by using sequence methods. J. Roy. Stat. Soc.: Ser. A (Appl. Stat.) 165(2), 317–334 (2002)
Müller-Birn, C., Karran, B., Luczak-Rösch, M., Lehmann, J.: Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is wikidata? (2015)
Preece, J., Shneiderman, B.: The reader-to-leader framework: motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Trans. Hum. Comput. Interact. 1(1), 13–32 (2009)
Tudorache, T., Noy, N.F., Tu, S., Musen, M.A.: Supporting collaborative ontology development in Protégé. In: Sheth, A., Staab, S., Dean, M., Paolucci, M., Maynard, D., Finin, T., Thirunarayan, K. (eds.) ISWC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5318, pp. 17–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-88564-1_2
Viegas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., Van Ham, F.: Talk before you type: coordination in wikipedia. In: 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2007, pp. 78–87. IEEE (2007)
Vrandečić, D., Krötzsch, M.: Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledge base. Commun. ACM 57(10), 78–85 (2014)
Welser, H.T., Gleave, E., Fisher, D., Smith, M.: Visualizing the signatures of social roles in online discussion groups. J. Soc. Struct. 8(2), 1–32 (2007)
Wenger, E.: Communities of practice: learning as a social system. Syst. Thinker 9(5), 2–3 (1998)
Ye, Y., Kishida, K.: Toward an understanding of the motivation of open source software developers. In: 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, Proceedings, pp. 419–429. IEEE (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cuong, T.T., Müller-Birn, C. (2016). Applicability of Sequence Analysis Methods in Analyzing Peer-Production Systems: A Case Study in Wikidata. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10047. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47873-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47874-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)