Observing burstiness in Wikipedia articles during new disease outbreaks

Abstract

Wikipedia can be conceptualized as an open sociotechnical environment that supports communities of humans and bots that update and contest information in Wikipedia articles. This environment affords a view to community or domain interactions and reactions to salient topics, such as disease outbreaks. But do reactions to different topics vary, and how can we measure them? One widely-used approach when answering these questions is to delineate levels of burstiness—communication flows characterized by repeated bursts instead of a continuous stream—in the construction of a Wikipedia article. A literature review, however, reveals that current burstiness approaches do not fully support efforts to compare Wikipedia community reactions to different articles. Through an empirical analysis of the construction of Wikipedia health-related articles, we both extend and refine burstiness as an analytical technique to understand the community dynamics underlying the construction of Wikipedia articles. We define a method by which we can categorize burstiness as high medium and low. Our empirical results suggest a proposed a model of burstiness.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Richard Giordano: orcid.org/0000-0002-2997-9502

ORCID for Wendy Hall: orcid.org/0000-0003-4327-7811

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics