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.