What can we find out by mapping interactions between editors and wiki pages?

Using social networking tools we can make use of wiki transaction logs to visualize the relationship between wiki pages and editors. Who is editing what; who are the most active editors, both in page edits and breadth of pages edited; which pages are being edited the most and by whom etc..

For this study, the Wikipatterns wiki site has been chosen as a subject, mainly because of its subject, community size, technical accessability and public nature. Wikipatterns is a wiki site about wiki usage. It is built with Atlassian's Confluence wiki and contains a toolbox of wiki usage patterns and anti-patterns. The site aims to be a guide to major stages of wiki adoption and it explores patterns that apply at each stage. Wikipatterns is a relatively new site, it started in January 2007, and can probably claim to have a very wiki literate membership. As of June 2007, there are about 400 users, of which 200 have edited a page and of these 200, about 40 users have made edits to 5 or more page.

The map on the left provides a visualization of wiki pages and editors from an extract from the Wikipatterns site.

One other interesting thing we can do with the data is to look at which editors are affiliated through editing common pages. That is, we could infer a relationship between  editors based on their co-editing of a page.

This map below illustrates these affiliations.

(Click on map to enlarge)

The size of the nodes reflect the number of connections between editor and page. For example, the larger editor nodes reflect relative editing activity in terms of different pages edited. The larger page nodes reflect the number of different editors having written to the page. The thickness of the links reflects the relative number of edits an editor has conducted on a given page.

Some interesting observations? The home page is one of the most edited pages, but the edits appear to be mostly done by infrequent editors, many for whom the home page is their only edit. The broad based editors appear to be seeding many new pages. There is a pattern of many lightly edited pages and many one page only editors compared to multi-edited pages or multi-page editors. This is in fact common in the world of social networks and is called the “small world” effect.

(Click on map to enlarge)