Evaluating authoritative sources using social networks: an insight from Wikipedia

Purpose – 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. Design / methodology / approach – A social network model for wikipedia has been constructed and metrics of importance such as centrality have been defined. Data have 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. Korfiatis et al Evaluating Authoritative Sources in Collaborative Editing Environments: An insight from Wikipedia Page: 2 Originality / Value This work tries to develop a network approach to the evaluation of wiki contributions and approaches the problem of quality of wikipedia content from a social network point of view. Practical Implications – We believe that the approach presented here could be used to improve the authoritativeness of content found in Wikipedia and similar sources.