Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Ecology of the digital world of Wikipedia.

ABSTRACT: Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors' activity and the articles' level of complexity. Using our metrics, one can better identify the human-labeled high-quality articles, e.g., "featured" ones, and differentiate them from the popular and controversial articles. Furthermore, the dynamics of the editor-article system is also well captured by the metrics, revealing the evolutionary pathways of articles and diverse roles of editors. We demonstrate that the collective effort of the editors indeed drives to the direction of article improvement.

SUBMITTER: Ogushi F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8443573 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Ecology of the digital world of Wikipedia.

Ogushi Fumiko F Kertész János J Kaski Kimmo K Shimada Takashi T

Scientific reports 20210915 1

Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors' acti ...[more]

PMID: 34526557

Similar Datasets

Digital Ecology: Coexistence and Domination among Interacting Networks.

Project description:The overwhelming success of Web 2.0, within which online social networks are key actors, has induced a paradigm shift in the nature of human interactions. The user-driven character of Web 2.0 services has allowed researchers to quantify large-scale social patterns for the first time. However, the mechanisms that determine the fate of networks at the system level are still poorly understood. For instance, the simultaneous existence of multiple digital services naturally raises questions concerning which conditions these services can coexist under. Analogously to the case of population dynamics, the digital world forms a complex ecosystem of interacting networks. The fitness of each network depends on its capacity to attract and maintain users' attention, which constitutes a limited resource. In this paper, we introduce an ecological theory of the digital world which exhibits stable coexistence of several networks as well as the dominance of an individual one, in contrast to the competitive exclusion principle. Interestingly, our theory also predicts that the most probable outcome is the coexistence of a moderate number of services, in agreement with empirical observations.

| S-EPMC4437301 | biostudies-literature

Interactions of pharmaceutical companies with world countries, cancers and rare diseases from Wikipedia network analysis.

Project description:Using the English Wikipedia network of more than 5 million articles we analyze interactions and interlinks between the 34 largest pharmaceutical companies, 195 world countries, 47 rare renal diseases and 37 types of cancer. The recently developed algorithm using a reduced Google matrix (REGOMAX) allows us to take account both of direct Markov transitions between these articles and also of indirect transitions generated by the pathways between them via the global Wikipedia network. This approach therefore provides a compact description of interactions between these articles that allows us to determine the friendship networks between them, as well as the PageRank sensitivity of countries to pharmaceutical companies and rare renal diseases. We also show that the top pharmaceutical companies in terms of their Wikipedia PageRank are not those with the highest market capitalization.

| S-EPMC6892506 | biostudies-literature

The ecology and evolution of patience in two New World monkeys.

Project description:Decision making often involves choosing between small, short-term rewards and large, long-term rewards. All animals, humans included, discount future rewards--the present value of delayed rewards is viewed as less than the value of immediate rewards. Despite its ubiquity, there exists considerable but unexplained variation between species in their capacity to wait for rewards--that is, to exert patience or self-control. Using two closely related primates--common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) and cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)--we uncover a variable that may explain differences in how species discount future rewards. Both species faced a self-control paradigm in which individuals chose between taking an immediate small reward and waiting a variable amount of time for a large reward. Under these conditions, marmosets waited significantly longer for food than tamarins. This difference cannot be explained by life history, social behaviour or brain size. It can, however, be explained by feeding ecology: marmosets rely on gum, a food product acquired by waiting for exudate to flow from trees, whereas tamarins feed on insects, a food product requiring impulsive action. Foraging ecology, therefore, may provide a selective pressure for the evolution of self-control.

| S-EPMC1626214 | biostudies-literature

Three-dimensional digital mapping of ecosystems: a new era in spatial ecology.

Project description:Ecological processes occur over multiple spatial, temporal and thematic scales in three-dimensional (3D) ecosystems. Characterizing and monitoring change in 3D structure at multiple scales is challenging within the practical constraints of conventional ecological tools. Remote sensing from satellites and crewed aircraft has revolutionized broad-scale spatial ecology, but fine-scale patterns and processes operating at sub-metre resolution have remained understudied over continuous extents. We introduce two high-resolution remote sensing tools for rapid and accurate 3D mapping in ecology-terrestrial laser scanning and structure-from-motion photogrammetry. These technologies are likely to become standard sampling tools for mapping and monitoring 3D ecosystem structure across currently under-sampled scales. We present practical guidance in the use of the tools and address barriers to widespread adoption, including testing the accuracy of structure-from-motion models for ecologists. We aim to highlight a new era in spatial ecology that uses high-resolution remote sensing to interrogate 3D digital ecosystems.

| S-EPMC7031661 | biostudies-literature

Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia.

Project description:In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the activity in these samples. On short time scales, we show that there is a clear correspondence between conflict and burstiness of activity patterns, and that memory effects play an important role in controversies. On long time scales, we identify three distinct developmental patterns for the overall behavior of the articles. We are able to distinguish cases eventually leading to consensus from those cases where a compromise is far from achievable. Finally, we analyze discussion networks and conclude that edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only.

| S-EPMC3380063 | biostudies-literature

Search strategies of Wikipedia readers.

Project description:The quest for information is one of the most common activity of human beings. Despite the the impressive progress of search engines, not to miss the needed piece of information could be still very tough, as well as to acquire specific competences and knowledge by shaping and following the proper learning paths. Indeed, the need to find sensible paths in information networks is one of the biggest challenges of our societies and, to effectively address it, it is important to investigate the strategies adopted by human users to cope with the cognitive bottleneck of finding their way in a growing sea of information. Here we focus on the case of Wikipedia and investigate a recently released dataset about users' click on the English Wikipedia, namely the English Wikipedia Clickstream. We perform a semantically charged analysis to uncover the general patterns followed by information seekers in the multi-dimensional space of Wikipedia topics/categories. We discover the existence of well defined strategies in which users tend to start from very general, i.e., semantically broad, pages and progressively narrow down the scope of their navigation, while keeping a growing semantic coherence. This is unlike strategies associated to tasks with predefined search goals, namely the case of the Wikispeedia game. In this case users first move from the 'particular' to the 'universal' before focusing down again to the required target. The clear picture offered here represents a very important stepping stone towards a better design of information networks and recommendation strategies, as well as the construction of radically new learning paths.

| S-EPMC5289465 | biostudies-literature

Towards a World Wide Web without digital inequality.

Project description:The World Wide Web (WWW) empowers people in developing regions by eradicating illiteracy, supporting women, and generating economic opportunities. However, their reliance on limited bandwidth and low-end phones leaves them with a poorer browsing experience compared to privileged users across the digital divide. To evaluate the extent of this phenomenon, we sent participants to 56 cities to measure the cost of mobile data and the average page load time. We found the cost to be orders of magnitude greater, and the average page load time to be four times slower, in some locations compared to others. Analyzing how popular webpages have changed over the past years suggests that they are increasingly designed with high processing power in mind, effectively leaving the less fortunate users behind. Addressing this digital inequality through new infrastructure takes years to complete and billions of dollars to finance. A more practical solution is to make the webpages more accessible by reducing their size and optimizing their load time. To this end, we developed a solution called Lite-Web and evaluated it in the Gilgit-Baltistan province of Pakistan, demonstrating that it transforms the browsing experience of a Pakistani villager using a low-end phone to almost that of a Dubai resident using a flagship phone. A user study in two high schools in Pakistan confirms that the performance gains come at no expense to the pages' look and functionality. These findings suggest that deploying Lite-Web at scale would constitute a major step toward a WWW without digital inequality.

| S-EPMC9934074 | biostudies-literature

Library instruction and Wikipedia: investigating students' perceived information literacy, lifelong learning, and social responsibility through Wikipedia editing.

Project description:ObjectivesThis article presents a multiyear pilot study delineating practical challenges, solutions, and lessons learned from Wikipedia editing experiences with first-year medical students at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. The purpose of our project was to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of Wikipedia editing to improve information literacy and lifelong learning skills and to investigate aspects of social responsibility in first-year medical students.MethodsLessons were provided through a combination of in-person and online instruction via the WikiEdu learning management system (LMS). Students next selected a health-related Wikipedia article to edit. After the editing experience, structural completeness data were collected from the WikiEdu LMS. Feedback was collected via an anonymous retrospective pre-post survey to assess the students' attitudes toward their perceived information literacy skills and the social responsibility of improving Wikipedia articles. Nonparametric tests were conducted to compare pre versus post outcomes.ResultsFifty-seven (79%) participants in the 2018 cohort and forty-nine (64%) participants in the 2019 cohort completed the retrospective pre-post survey. In both cohorts, respondents showed statistically significant increases (p<.05) in self-rating of all ten domains of information literacy and social responsibility after completing the program.ConclusionsThis study showed that medical students are competent editors of Wikipedia and that their contributions improve both the quality of the articles and their own perceived information literacy. Additionally, editing medicine-related articles provides an opportunity to build students' social responsibility by improving content on an open platform that reaches millions each day.

| S-EPMC9014945 | biostudies-literature

Understanding Editing Behaviors in Multilingual Wikipedia.

Project description:Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of the content written by multilingual editors of the English, German, and Spanish editions of Wikipedia. This dataset contains over two million paragraphs edited by over 15,000 multilingual users from July 8 to August 9, 2013. We analyze these multilingual editors in terms of their engagement, interests, and language proficiency in their primary and non-primary (secondary) languages and find that the English edition of Wikipedia displays different dynamics from the Spanish and German editions. Users primarily editing the Spanish and German editions make more complex edits than users who edit these editions as a second language. In contrast, users editing the English edition as a second language make edits that are just as complex as the edits by users who primarily edit the English edition. In this way, English serves a special role bringing together content written by multilinguals from many language editions. Nonetheless, language remains a formidable hurdle to the spread of content: we find evidence for a complexity barrier whereby editors are less likely to edit complex content in a second language. In addition, we find that multilinguals are less engaged and show lower levels of language proficiency in their second languages. We also examine the topical interests of multilingual editors and find that there is no significant difference between primary and non-primary editors in each language.

| S-EPMC4865083 | biostudies-literature

Impact of Wikipedia on citation trends.

Project description:It has been suggested that the "visibility" of an article influences its citation count. More specifically, it is believed that the social media can influence article citations.Here we tested the hypothesis that inclusion of scholarly references in Wikipedia affects the citation trends. To perform this analysis, we introduced a citation "propensity" measure, which is inspired by the concept of amino acid propensity for protein secondary structures. We show that although citation counts generally increase during time, the citation "propensity" does not increase after inclusion of a reference in Wikipedia.

| S-EPMC4803015 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data