The evolution of classification systems - the case of wikipedia categories - new paper

[Andrea Scharnhorst]

Evolution of Wikipedia's Category Structure
Krzysztof Suchecki<http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Suchecki_K/0/1/0/all/0/1>, Alkim Almila Akdag Salah<http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Salah_A/0/1/0/all/0/1>, Cheng Gao<http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Gao_C/0/1/0/all/0/1>, Andrea Scharnhorst<http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Scharnhorst_A/0/1/0/all/0/1>
(Submitted on 4 Mar 2012)
Wikipedia, as a social phenomenon of collaborative knowledge creating, hasbeen studied extensively from various points of views. The category system of Wikipedia, introduced in 2004, has attracted relatively little attention. In this study, we focus on the documentation of knowledge, and the transformation of this documentation with time. We take Wikipedia as a proxy for knowledge in general and its category system as an aspect of the structure of this knowledge. We investigate the evolution of the category structure of the English Wikipedia from its birth in 2004 to 2008. We treat the category system as if it is a hierarchical Knowledge Organization System, capturing the changes in the distributions of the top categories. We investigate how the clustering of articles, defined by the category system, matches the direct link network between the articles and show how it changes over time. We find the Wikipedia category network mostly stable, but with occasional reorganization. We showthat the clustering matches the link structure quite well, except short periods preceding the reorganizations.
Comments:       Preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Advances in Complex Systems (2012) this http URL<http://www.worldscinet.com/acs/>, 19 pages, 7 figures
Subjects:       Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Digital Libraries (cs.DL); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
Cite as:        arXiv:1203.0788v1<http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0788v1> [physics.soc-ph]
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