A paper coauthored by Brian Keegan, Noshir Contractor, and assistant professor Darren Gergle examining the coauthorship networks of Wikipedia articles was accepted to the 2012 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Abstract:

Prior scholarship on Wikipedia’s collaboration processes has examined the properties of either editors or articles, but not the interactions between both. We analyze the coauthorship network of Wikipedia articles about breaking news demanding intense coordination and compare the properties of these articles and the editors who contribute to them to articles about historical airline accidents. Using p*/ERGM methods to test a multi-level, multi-theoretical model, we identify how editors’ attributes and editing patterns interact with articles’ attributes and authorship history. Editors’ attributes like prior experience have a stronger influence on the self-organization of the collaboration, but article attributes also play significant roles. Finally, we discuss the implications our findings and methods have for understanding the socio-material duality of collective intelligence systems beyond Wikipedia.