Friday, July 18, 2008

Analysis of Author Networks in Wikipedia

The Social Sciences Department of the J.W. Goethe Univsersity Frankfurt sent out a press release on idw about a nice piece of work by Christian Stegbauer, a professor of social science at this department.

In his work, Stegbauer analysed the network of Wikipedia authors and their contributions to Wikipedia topic discussions on philosophy. The network analysis - or graph analysis - showed the social network of Wikipedia authors, how they interact and how they are connected through common topics.

In their graph analysis Stegbauer et al. used an approach very similar to TaxonRank. Of course, the same questions that Stegbauer asked about Wikipedia author networks could also be applied to taxonomists.

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