There is No Deadline - Time Evolution of Wikipedia Discussions

Arxiv preprint arXiv:1204.3453, 2012.

By Andreas Kaltenbrunner and David Laniado

Abstract

Wikipedia articles are by definition never finished. Many of them have associated talk pages, where their content is discussed by editors. Here we analyse the evolution of these discussions to unveil temporal patterns in the interactions in such a large production community. First, we investigate peaks in the discussion activity and their relation with peaks in edits to articles; furthermore we introduce a measure to account for how fast discussions grow in complexity. The results point out the high impact of time instant specific hot topics on the amount and speed of the discussions, suggesting them as a mirror of a collective stream of consciousness.

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