WikiChron networks: an analysis of the wiki communities

Wiki communities allow for great differences in how they are organized, depending on factors such as community goals, norms governing behavior, policies agreed upon, nature of work, or characteristics of contributors. Social network analysis is a good tool to analyze how wiki communities work.

Furthermore, wiki communities are extremely dynamic: the number and organization of contributors change, as do the roles they play. That is why the time dimension must be taken into account.

There has not been enough research on the evolution of collaboration networks within wikis, according to Youssef El Faqir, Javier Arroyo, and Abel Serrano. To introduce such analysis, they present the study Visualization of the evolution of collaboration and communication networks in wikis and a web application (WikiChron networks) to visualize how the structure of a wiki community evolves and to track the role of its editors over time. Depending on the pages that are considered for interactions, the tool can display three different community networks: articles, articles’ talk pages, or users’ talk pages. By analyzing the evolution of a wiki community in different moments and showing network structures that are similar to those of other wiki communities, they prove the utility of the tool.