STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH

1. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH arXiv:physics/0602026 • Capocci, V. Servedio, F. Colaiori, • D. Donato, L.S. Buriol, S. Leonardi , GC Centro “E. Fermi”

2. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction

3. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction • Wikipedia in other languages • You may read and edit articles in many different languages: • Wikipedia encyclopedia languages with over 100,000 articles • Deutsch (German) · Français (French) · Italiano (Italian) · (Japanese) · Nederlands (Dutch) · Polski (Polish) · Português (Portuguese) · Svenska (Swedish) • Wikipedia encyclopedialanguages with over 10,000 articles • العربية (Arabic) · Български (Bulgarian) · Català (Catalan) · Česky (Czech) · Dansk (Danish) · Eesti (Estonian) · Español (Spanish) · Esperanto · Galego (Galician) · עברית (Hebrew) · Hrvatski (Croatian) · Ido · Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) · 한국어 (Korean) · Lietuvių (Lithuanian) · Magyar (Hungarian) · Bahasa Melayu (Malay) · Norsk bokmål (Norwegian) · Norsk nynorsk (Norwegian) · Română (Romanian) · Русский (Russian) · Slovenčina (Slovak) · Slovenščina (Slovenian) · Српски (Serbian) · Suomi (Finnish) · Türkçe (Turkish) · Українська (Ukrainian) · 中文 (Chinese) • Wikipedia encyclopedialanguages with over 1,000 articles • Alemannisch (Alemannic) · Afrikaans · Aragonés (Aragonese) · Asturianu (Asturian) · Azərbaycan (Azerbaijani) · Bân-lâm-gú (Min Nan) · Беларуская (Belarusian) · Bosanski (Bosnian) · Brezhoneg (Breton) · Чăваш чěлхи (Chuvash) · Corsu (Corsican) · Cymraeg (Welsh) · Ελληνικά (Greek) · Euskara (Basque) · فارسی (Persian) · Føroyskt (Faroese) · Frysk (Western Frisian) · Gaeilge (Irish) · Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic) · हिन्दी (Hindi) · Interlingua · Íslenska (Icelandic) · Basa Jawa (Javanese) · ქართული (Georgian) · ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) · Kurdî / كوردی (Kurdish) · Latina (Latin) · Latviešu (Latvian) · Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) · Limburgs (Limburgish) · Македонски (Macedonian) · मराठी (Marathi) · Napulitana (Neapolitan) · Occitan · Ирон (Ossetic) · Plattdüütsch (Low Saxon) · Scots · Sicilianu (Sicilian) · Simple English · Shqip (Albanian) · Sinugboanon (Cebuano) · Srpskohrvatski/Српскохрватски (Serbo–Croatian) · தமிழ் (Tamil) · Tagalog · ภาษาไทย (Thai) · Tatarça (Tatar) · తెలుగు (Telugu) · Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese) · Walon (Walloon) • Complete list · Multilingual coordination · Start a Wikipedia in another language

4. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction A Nature investigation aimed to find if Wikipedia is an authoritative source of information with respect to established sources as Encyclopedia Britannica. • Among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: • the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; • the one in Britannica, about three. • On the other hand the articles on Wikipedia are longer on average than those of Britannica. This accounts for a lower rate of errors in Wikipedia. • In a survey of more than 1,000 Nature authors • 70% had heard of Wikipedia • of those • 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis. • less than 10% help to update it (Nature 438, 900-901; 2005)

5. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction

6. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction Actually, things are a little bit more complicated

7. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction There is not only “control” by users, but also conflict of interests. Thereby sometimes is not possible to modify 100% of the structure since some sites are locked. One of the biggest scandal was the biography of Journalist John Seigenthaler who was accused to be involved in the murder of President J.F. Kennedy Some issues and languages have more controls than others. An experiment made by Italian newspaper “L’espresso” introduced Deliberately some errors in two voices • One in the career of Football player Rui Costa (to be part of an Italian team in the early 90’s) • To introduce a non-existing philosopher • Obviously: • The error for the football player was corrected after 30’ • The philosopher remained in place until the experiment was published ( at least two weeks)

8. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction WHY STUDYING WIKIPEDIA? • sociological reasons: the encyclopedia collects pages written by a number of indipendent and eterogeneous individuals. Each of them autonomously decides about the content of the articles with the only constraint of a prefixed layout. The autonomy is a common feature of the content creation in the Web. The wikipedia authors’ community is formed by members whose only wish is to make available to the world concepts and topics that they consider meaningful. In some sense, tracing the evolution of the wikipedia subsets should mirror the develop of significant trends within each linguistic community. • • generation on time: wikipedia provides time information associated with nodes. Moreover, it provides old information: time information for the creation and the modifications for each page on the dataset. • • independency of external links: wikipedia articles link mainly to articles on the same dataset. • • variety of graph sizes: it can be collected one graph by language, and the graph dimensions vary from a few hundred pages up to half million pages.

9. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Introduction • Summarizing: • We have available all the history of growth, so that we can study the evolution • We have an example of a “social” network of huge size • We can compare the system produced by users of different language, thereby • measuring the effect of different cultures. • We can study Wikipedia as a case study for the World Wide Web WE RECOVER A PREFERENTIAL ATTACHMENT MECHANISM FROM THE DATA. DIFFERENT LANGUAGES PRODUCE SIMILAR STRUCTURES WE FIND A SYSTEM SIMILAR TO THE WWW EVEN IF THE MICROSCOPIC RULE OF GROWTH IS VERY DIFFERENT.

10. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Data The datasets of each language are available in two selfextracting files for mysql database. The table cur contains the current on-line articles, whereas the table old contains all previous versions of each current article. Old versions of an article are identified for using the same title, and not the same id. The dataset dumps are updated almost weekly, so the current graph is usually not more than a week old. For generating a graph from the link structure of a dataset, each article is considered a node and each hyperlink between articles is a link in this graph. In the wikipedia datasets, each webpage is a single article. An article also might contain some external links that point pages outside the dataset. Usually wikipedia articles has no external links, or just a few of them. These kind of links are not considered for generating the wikigraphs, since we want to restrict the graph to pages into the set being analyzed.

11. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Data We generated six wikigraphs, wikiEN, wikiDE, wikiFR, wikiES, wikiIT and wikiPT, generated from the English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese datasets, respectively. The graphs were obtained from an old dump of June 13, 2004. We are not using the current data due to disk space restrictions. The English dataset of June 2005 has more than 36 GB compacted, that is about 200 GB expanded. The page that was mostly visited was the main pages for wikiEN, wikiDE, wikiFR and wikiES, while that for the datasets wikiIT and wikiPT there were no visits associated with the pages.

12. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Topology • SCC (Strongly Connected Component) includes pages that are mutually reachable by traveling on the graph • IN component is the region from which one can reach SCC • OUT component encompasses the pages reached from SCC. • TENDRILS are pages reacheable from the IN component,and not pointing to SCC or OUT region TENDRILS also includes those pages that point to the OUT region not belonging to any of the other defined regions. • TUBES connect directly IN and OUT regions, • DISCONNECTED regions are those isolated from the rest. The Bow-tie structure, found in the WWW (Broder et al. Comp. Net. 33, 309, 2000)

13. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Topology The measure/size of the Wikigraph for the various languages. The percentage of the various components of the Wikigraph for the various languages.

14. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Topology The Degree shows fat tails that can be approximated by a power-law function of the kind P(k) ~ k-g Where the exponent is the same both for in-degree and out-degree. In the case of WWW 2 ≤ gin ≤ 2.1 in–degree(empty) and out–degree(filled) Occurrency distributions for the Wikgraph in English (○) and Portuguese ().

15. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Topology As regards the assortativity (as measured by the average degree of the neighbours of a vertex with degree k) there is no evidence of any assortative behaviour. The average neighbors’ in–degree, computed along incoming edges, as a function of the in–degree for the English (○) and Portuguese ()

16. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Topology The pagerank distribution for wikiEN is a power law function with γ = 2.1. Previous measures in webgraphs also exhibit the same behaviour for the pagerank distribution. We list the number of visits of the top ranked pages just to show that this value is not related with the pagerank values. We confirm that very little correlation was found between the link analysis characteristics and the actual number of visits.

17. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Dynamics Given the history of growth one can verify the hypothesis of preferential attachment. This is done by means of the histogram P(k) who gives the number of vertices (whose degree is k) acquiring new connections at time t. This is quantity is weighted by the factor N(t)/n(k,t) We find preferential attachment for in and out degree. English (○) and Portuguese (). White= in-degree Filled = out-degree

18. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Dynamics In our opinion the nature of this preferential attachment is effective ratther than the real driving force in the phenomenon. In other words the linear preferential attachment can be originated by a copying procedure (new vertices are introduced by copying old ones and keeping most of the edges). Also we could have a sort of fitness for the various entries (but in this case one has a multidimensional series of quantities describing the importance of one page). Apart the interpretation the data show a rather clear LINEAR PREFERENTIAL ATTACHMENT

19. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Dynamics Other power-laws related to dyamics need to be explained For example the number of updates also follows a power law. Each point presents the number of nodes (y axis) that were updated exactly x times.

20. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Dynamics This feature is time invariant

21. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Modelling From these data it seems that a model in the spirit of BA could reproduce most of the features of the system. • Actually • This network is oriented. • The preferential attachment in Wikipedia has a somewhat different nature. Here, most of the times, the edges are added between existing vertices differently from the BA model. For instance, in the English version of Wikipedia a largely dominant fraction 0.883 of new edges is created between two existing pages, while a smaller fraction of edges points or leaves a newly added vertex (0.026 and 0.091 respectively).

22. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Modelling • We introduced an evolution rule, similar to other models of • rewiring already considered*, • At each time step, a vertex is added to the network. It is connected to the existing vertices by M oriented edges; the direction of each edge is drawn at random: • with probability R1 the edge leaves the new vertex pointing to an existing one chosen with probability proportional to its in–degree; • with probability R2, the edge points to the new vertex, and the source vertex is chosen with probability proportional to its out–degree. • Finally, with probability R3 = 1 − R1 − R2 the edge is added between existing vertices: the source vertex is chosen with probability proportional to the out–degree, while the destination vertex is chosen with probability proportional to the in–degree. * See for example Krapivsky Rodgers and Redner PRL 86 5401 (2001)

23. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Modelling The model can be solved analytically We can use for the model the empirical values of R1=0.026 R2=0.091 R3=0.083 Already measured for the English version of Wikigraph P(kin) ~kin- gin gin = -(1+1/(1-R2)) P(kout) ~kout- gout gout = -(1+1/(1-R1)) gin 2.100 gout  2.027

24. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Modelling The model can be solved analytically Knnin(kin) ~M N1-R1R1R2/R3 (R3≠0) Both cases is constant Knnin(kin) ~M R1R2 ln (N) (R3=0) The value of the constant depends also upon the initial conditions. The two lines refer to two realizations of the model where in one case the 0.5% of the first vertices has been removed.

25. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Conclusions • We have a structure that resembles the bow-tie of the WWW • We have a power-law decay for the degree distributions and also • a power-law decay for the number of one page updates • Preferential Attachment in the Rewiring seems to be the driving force • in the evolution of the system • The microscopic structure of rewiring is very different from that of WWW • In principle a user can change any series of edges and add as many • pages as wanted. Still most of the quantities are similar

26. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE WIKIGRAPH • Conclusions It turns out that the pagerank of the pages is not related with the number of visit opens a very interesting scenario for further research work. Since, by definition, pagerank should give us the visit time of the page and since actually it is complety indipendent by the number of visits, we wonder if pagerank is a good measure of the authoritativeness of the pages in wikigraphs and which modifications should be introduced in order to tune its performances.