Information cascades are a fascinating occurrence, especially when it occurs in a free and public system in which one would assume that actions and reactions would be more randomized. One wouldn’t be faulted to think that since there are many variables and sometimes random failures or successes that the cascade would eventually stop or simply have a short life span. However a recent study “Finding Structure in Wikipedia Edit Activity: An Information Cascade Approach” gives another example of an information cascade on ironically the free source of free information in the world: Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is an inherently untrustworthy source as anyone is allowed to change information on any article or page. But in the same way this nature of being free and public changes it from an untrustworthy resource to a trustable one because so many different users including experts have verified the information. However, when a malicious, misinformed, or even valid actor changes a fact on Wikipedia there are information cascades that occur due to an initial update to a page which results in another page adopting the same information and so on and so forth.
The research team found interesting results regarding the cascade structure and properties. The study collected start from January 1st 2015 to March 31st 2015 from the English Wikipedia, the text that was changed, and by which user.
The size of the cascade was often small, the result summary states 13.7 as the average cascade length with the smallest being 2 and largest being 8068. The average duration of a cascade was also much closer to the shortest path duration than the longest. The implication of both a short cascade length and duration implies that these blindly trusted claims are not spread too far.
From this graph it can be said that information cascades on Wikipedia tend to form strongly connected components and are likely to group together based on the information benign cascaded. This makes sense as pages that share information are more likely to be related to one another.
This revelation can potentially be used by WIkipedia to stop or confirm that the right and accurate information is being spread. For example after a newsworthy incident happens many Wikipedia pages are likely to be updated, by using this sort of recognition Wikipedia can fact check and official support or prevent the information spread.
One reply on “Finding structure in Wikipedia Edit Activity”
This was a great read! It’s quite interesting to see how a certain piece of information being changed on a particular page could result in an information cascade. I’m quite surprised the average size of the cascade is pretty small, all things considered. I totally agree with the point you made at the end as well. It would be cool to see how Wikipedia could use this revelation to their advantage and increase the trustworthiness of their site!