Visualization of the evolution of collaboration and communication networks in wikis

Abstract

Commons-based peer production communities can be analyzed with the help of social network analysis. However, since they are fluid organizations that change over time, the time dimension needs to be taken into account. In this work we present a web application, WikiChron networks, to facilitate the study of the evolution of wiki communities over time. The tool displays three different community networks depending on the pages considered for the interactions: articles, talk pages of articles or talk pages of users. The consideration of these three networks offer complementary views of the same community, while the time dimension makes possible to observe how the network structures changes over time and the changes in the network role experimented by some editors. We illustrate the usefulness of our tool analyzing the evolution of a wiki community in different moments and showing network structures that can be seen in other wiki communities. WikiChron networks is open source and is publicly available. We hope that it will stimulate research on the evolution of collaboration and communication in wiki communities.