Evolution of Wikipedia's category structure

Suchecki, Krzysztof and Akdağ Salah, Almila Alkım and Gao, Cheng and Scharnhorst, Andrea (2012) Evolution of Wikipedia's category structure. Advances in Complex Systems, 15 (Supple). ISSN 0219-5259 (Print) 1793-6802 (Online)

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Abstract

Wikipedia, as a social phenomenon of collaborative knowledge creation, has been studied extensively from various points of view. The category system of Wikipedia, introduced in 2004, has attracted relatively little attention. In this study, we focus on the documentation of knowledge, and the transformation of this documentation with time. We take Wikipedia as a sample of knowledge in general and its category system as an aspect of the structure of this knowledge. We investigate the evolution of the category structure of the English Wikipedia from its birth in 2004 to 2008. We treat the category system as if it is a hierarchical Knowledge Organization System, capturing the changes in the distributions of the top categories. We investigate how the clustering of articles, defined by the category system, matches the direct link network between the articles and show how it changes over time. We find the Wikipedia category network mostly stable, but with occasional reorganization. We show that the clustering matches the link structure quite well, except short periods preceding the reorganizations.
Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Article Number: 1250068
Uncontrolled Keywords: Classification systems; Wikipedia; evolution; knowledge organization
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics
Divisions: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > Academic programs > Visual Arts & Communication Design
Depositing User: Almila Alkım Akdağ Salah
Date Deposited: 18 Jul 2012 14:14
Last Modified: 26 Apr 2022 08:56
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/19181

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