Analyzing Multidimensional Networks within MediaWikis!
WikiSym 2013!Hong Kong, China!August 7, 2013!
Brian Keegan, Ph.D. @bkeegan
Arber Ceni Marc A. Smith, Ph.D. @marc_smith
Outline!• Motivation!• Relationships within MediaWikis!• Multidimensional network exploration!• NodeXL platform!• NodeXL MediaWiki Importer!• Case Study!• Demo!
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Motivation!• Collaboration is fundamentally
relational!• Use network analysis methods to
understand success of wikis!!• A variety of MediaWiki meta-data
accessible through API are relational!• Build on top of existing network
analysis package to simplify retrieval, structuring, cleanup, and visualization!
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Relationship types!User-Object relationships!
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User-User relationships!!!
Object-Object relationships!
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e a
e e
a a
User-Object relationships!
• Editing!• user e makes a revision to article a!
• Watchlist!• user e has article a on watchlist!
• Affiliation!• user e is a member of project a!
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e a
Undirected User-User relationships!
• Co-authorship!• e1 and e2 edited the same article !
• Co-affiliation!• e1 and e2 are members of the same project!
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e1 e2
Directed User-User relationships!
• Discussion!• e1 left a message on e2’s talk page !
• Article trajectory!• e2 modified the article after e1!
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e1 e2
Undirected Object-Object relationships!
• Shared authorship!• a1 and a2 were edited by the same users!
• Category co-membership!• a1 and a2 are members of the same categories!
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a2 a1
Directed Object-Object relationships!
• Hyperlinks!• a1 has a link to a2 !
• Editor trajectory!• a2 is modified by a user after a1!
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a2 a1
Multidimensional networks!
• Multiple types of links between nodes!• Hyperlink!• Shared authorship!• Category co-membership!
• Presence of overlapping ties may explain collaboration more richly!
• Absence of overlapping ties may reveal anomalies for follow-on analysis!
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a2 a1
Network exploration!
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Network exploration!
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NodeXL Platform!• https://nodexl.codeplex.com/!• Lower barriers to entry by using spreadsheet workflows!• Network analysis plug-in for Microsoft Excel!• “Spigots” to import network data from Twitter, Facebook,
Flickr, Email, YouTube, and WWW!
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NodeXL MediaWiki Importer!• https://wikiimporter.codeplex.com/!• Graph data provider for NodeXL à new “spigot”!• Queries MediaWiki API through DotNetWikiBot
framework!• Given a Page and a Site, returns a PageList!
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NodeXL MediaWiki Importer!
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Rela%onship to crawl
Boundary condi%ons
Case Study!• Compare the structures of different relationships across
two types of English Wikipedia articles!• “Social media”!• “Pope Francis”!
• Node layout via “Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale”!• Spring-embedding layout to emphasize clusters of ties!
• Nodes grouped via “Clauset-Newman-Moore”!• Nodes assigned to group if more ties within group than outside!
• “Group-in-a-box” layout!• Ties within group visualized individually, ties between groups
collapsed together!
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Co-authorship!Pope Francis! Social media!
Nodes are editors who contributed to article Links together if they contributed to other articles
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Article trajectory!Pope Francis! Social media!
Nodes are editors who contributed to article Links together if they edited after one another
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User discussion!Pope Francis! Social media!
Nodes are editors who contributed to article Links together if they left messages on other users’ talk
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Shared authorship!Pope Francis! Social media!
Nodes are other articles edited by the users who contributed to article Links together if they share multiple co-authors
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Hyperlink!Pope Francis! Social media!
Nodes are articles linked from seed article Links together if they link to each other
Structural Typologies!
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Discussion!• Wikipedia and other MediaWiki projects contain a variety
of complex and multidimensional relationships among users and objects!
• NodeXL MediaWiki Importer is a tool for simplifying complex data extraction and analysis workflows!
• NodeXL provides a powerful suite of tools to analyze and visualize the structure of multidimensional relationships!
• Empirical testing of social theories as well as diagnosing the health of online communities!
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Future work!• Incorporating additional meta-data!
• Editors (registered, edit count, block count, tenure)!• Objects (namespace, age, edit count, assessment, pageviews)!• Content-level features (images, keywords)!• Temporal features!
• Additional relationships!• Inter-language links!• Backlinks!• Wiki-love!• Blocks (users and objects)!
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THANK YOU!!
Brian Keegan, Ph.D. @bkeegan
Arber Ceni Marc A. Smith, Ph.D. @marc_smith
