Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-07-31/Recent research

Those who are curious about influential journals on Wikipedia may want to take a look at WP:JCW, in particular WP:JCW/TAR. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:06, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Does anyone at all understand Ashford et al's "Understanding the Signature of Controversial Wikipedia Articles through Motifs in Editor Revision Networks"? I've never seen anything like it. I asked in more detail at WP:JIMBOTALK. EllenCT (talk) 11:12, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I understand the mathematical operations. I suspect the phrase "controversial articles exhibit more reciprocation", that they use, reflects that such articles are more subject to edit warring, or at least, pairs of editors negotiating acceptable content in successive edits. It's nevertheless interesting to see an algorithm that picks up such behaviour. I could see such a technique being useful to pick up pathological user behaviour in financial systems, too. William Avery (talk) 19:20, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * how do you map the ordered list of editors to the nodes of the triads? For their example in Figure 1, what are the corresponding triads of Figure 2, and which editors are associated with each of those resulting triads' three (left, right, top) nodes? EllenCT (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Editors A, B and D in figure 1 form a one-way circular relationship corresponding to 030C in figure 2. Any editor could be any node. Triad A, B and C form the graph 111U: A is at bottom right, C is at bottom left (A and B both follow/precede each other in the sequence), B is top (B follows A; B and C never follow each other). The algorithm to get the graphs from an ordered list of edits (the edit history) wouldn't be difficult. As a procedural algorithm, merely move along the edit history considering sections that involve three different editors, then determine whether each editor follows/precedes each of the other two editors in that segment of the history. In practice you would use a tool like https://igraph.org/. William Avery (talk) 12:32, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm still trying to get my head around the exact algorithm here, but let me ask: do you believe that the paper establishes that a meaningfully accurate classification procedure exists? Because I don't think it does, even if the algorithm is well defined. If so, any idea how accurate it is? EllenCT (talk) 02:20, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
 * No. I don't really have any opinions on those matters. Perhaps the authors do. William Avery (talk) 08:45, 5 August 2019 (UTC)