Ein spannendes Paper, das zwei meiner Interessen zusammenbringt: Wiki und Visualisierung. Die AutorInnen visualisieren die Entstehungsgeschichten von Wikipedia-Artikeln und beschreiben zahlreiche Muster von Wiki-Vandalismus. Erst die Visualisierungen ermöglichen dabei den für das Erkennen von übergeordneten Mustern notwendigen Überblick.

In this paper, we describe our investigation into how and why such an open and vulnerable system works. Wikipedia generously makes public its database of articles, along with all past revisions of those articles, providing a rich record of interactions between authors. Mining this vast data set is a challenge: to tackle it, we created a new visualization method, dubbed history flow, designed to show relationships between multiple document versions. Exploratory analysis with this visualization revealed complex patterns of cooperation and conflict. We also describe some initial statistical corroboration for the patterns we find. Finally, we propose several hypotheses based on these analyses for how and why this collective authoring environment succeeds.

The Internet has fostered an unconventional and powerful style of collaboration: “wiki” web sites, where every visitor has the power to become an editor. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of Wikipedia, a prominent, thriving wiki. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a new exploratory data analysis tool, the history flow visualization, which is effective in revealing patterns within the wiki context and which we believe will be useful in other collaborative situations as well. Second, we discuss several collaboration patterns highlighted by this visualization tool and corroborate them with statistical analysis. Third, we discuss the implications of these patterns for the design and governance of online collaborative social spaces. We focus on the relevance of authorship, the value of community surveillance in ameliorating antisocial behavior, and how authors with competing perspectives negotiate their differences.