Leveraging editor collaboration patterns in wikipedia

Abstract

Predicting the positive or negative attitude of individuals towards each other in a social environment has long been of interest, with applications in many domains. We investigate this problem in the context of the collaborative editing of articles in Wikipedia, showing that there is enough information in the edit history of the articles that can be utilized for predicting the attitude of co-editors. We train a model using a distant supervision approach, by labeling interactions between editors as positive or negative depending on how these editors vote for each other in Wikipedia admin elections. We use the model to predict the attitude among other editors, who have neither run nor voted in an election. We validate our model by assessing its accuracy in the tasks of predicting the results of the actual elections, and identifying controversial articles. Our analysis reveals that the interactions in co-editing articles can accurately predict votes, although there are differences between positive and negative votes. For instance, the accuracy when predicting negative votes substantially increases by considering longer traces of the edit history. As for predicting controversial articles, we show that exploiting positive and negative interactions during the production of an article provides substantial improvements on previous attempts at detecting controversial articles in Wikipedia.