Evaluating authoritative sources using social networks: an insight from Wikipedia

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to evaluating contributions in collaborative authoring environments, and in particular, Wikis using social network measures.

A social network model for Wikipedia has been constructed, and metrics of importance such as centrality have been defined. Data has been gathered from articles belonging to the same topic using a web crawler, in order to evaluate the outcome of the social network measures in the articles.

Finds that the question of the reliability regarding Wikipedia content is a challenging one and as Wikipedia grows, the problem becomes more demanding, especially for topics with controversial views such as politics or history.

It is believed that the approach presented here could be used to improve the authoritativeness of content found in Wikipedia and similar sources.

This work tries to develop a network approach to the evaluation of Wiki contributions, and approaches the problem of quality Wikipedia content from a social network point of view.