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 has 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. Findings – Finds that the question of the reliability regarding Wikipedia content is a challenging one and as Wikipedia grows, the problem becomes more demanding, especially for topics with controversial views such as politics or history. Practical implications – It is believed that the approach presented here could be used to improve the authoritativeness of content found in Wikipedia and similar sources. Originality/value – This work tries to develop a network approach to the evaluation of Wiki contributions, and approaches the problem of quality Wikipedia content from a social network point of view.