Agent Simulation of Collaborative Knowledge Processing in Wikipedia

Wikipedia, a User Innovation Community (UIC), is becoming increasingly influential source of knowledge. The knowledge in Wikipedia is produced and processed collaboratively by UIC. The results of this collaboration process present various seemingly complex patterns demonstrated by update history of different articles in Wikipedia. Agent simulation is a powerful method that is used to study the behaviors of complex systems of interacting and autonomous agents. In this paper, we study the collaborative knowledge processing in Wikipedia using a simple agent-based model. The proposed model considers factors including knowledge distribution among agents, number of agents, behavior of agents and vandalism. We use this model to explain content growth rate, number and frequency of updates, edit war and vandalism in Wikipedia articles. The results demonstrate that the model captures the important empirical aspects in collaborative knowledge processing in Wikipedia. 1