As you probably all know, Wikipedia is the largest free-content encyclopedia on the Internet written by hundreds and thousands of contributors. In the beginning of March 2008, official article count for all Wikipedias reached 10 million.

What we are not always aware of when we are searching for Wikipedia articles to quench our thirst for knowledge is that Wikipedia is an active online community. It is a social-affiliation network since it contains people and activities. There are many ways in which editors can get to know others. Two editors can work on the same article and become friends as well as argue about it and as a result, influence their structural social balance in the network. Activities also include correcting articles, creating vandalism, anonymously editing articles, praising others’ articles etc.

Wikipedia is also guided by its official policies and guidelines. The five pillars explain that the articles should be original and be un-biased to present all points of view. Wikipedia also has the three-revert rule to avoid edit wars between contributors: an editor must not perform more than three reverts, or returning to a previous version on a single page within a 24-hour period (Wikipedia).

In addition, all Wikipedia editors have Talk pages in which they can comment about the user and award them with tokens. They also talk and build arguments about what to include and not include on the article. They also use it to correct some editor’s method of using the site by adding a post on his/her talk page.

We can see that the social affiliation network becomes complicated to analyze when there are many factors that shape and limit social interactions. The wiki format used in Wikipedia shapes the activities that people can do as well as control their power. People can edit any article that was written or create an article about a new topic at the same time others have the ability to return the article to the previous version.

Software and collaboration graphs created by others to study Wikipedia help to understand the community better. They help to examine criticisms of Wikipedia such as suitability as an encyclopedia, systemic bias, quality concerns, anonymous editing etc. These tools can be used to track the patterns of collaboration within a field over a century or more and extrapolate how the social structure of collaboration may work in other settings as well.

One example of this collaboration graph is WikiDashboard, a tool developed by the Augmented Social Cognition team at Xerox PARC. When users visit an article, they can visualize temporal change patterns in Wikipedia such as intensity of edits over time, edits contributed by a user inside the time interval, statistics that display the users’ total edits and percentage of edits to the entry over time. This is very useful to get a quick glance of the user’s editing interests and to further help form trust heuristics of the site.

It would be very interesting to study the social affiliation network in addition to collaboration graphs to improve social practices of the existing social network in Wikipedia.