Dynamics of edit war sequences in wikipedia

Abstract

In any collaborative system, cooperation and conflicts exist together. While in some cases these conflicts improve the output, they also lead to increased overhead. This requires examining the dynamics of these conflicts with the help of underlying data. In Wikipedia articles, the conflicts are captured by edit wars which may be examined through the revision history of these articles. In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of the conflicts present in 1,208 controversial articles of Wikipedia captured in the form of edit war sequences. We examine various key characteristics of these sequences and further use them to estimate the outcome of the edit wars. The study indicates the possibility of devising automated coordination mechanisms for handling conflicts in collaborative spaces.