Social Knowledge Dynamics: A Case Study on Modeling Wikipedia

We show the current research progresses and focuses on Wikipedia to try to understand principles behind social knowledge dynamics. Wikipedia is a popular web-based en-cyclopedia, which can be edited freely and collaboratively by its users. This kind of truly collaborative and social plat-form provides a good opportunity for sociologist, physicists, computer scientists, and other researchers on traditional social knowledge dynamics to better understand the evo-lution of social cognition- that is, the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason. We survey recent research work on how to characterize global features of Wikipedia and how to model the growth of Wikipedia. While previous work mainly focus on statistical analysis of a mass of date from Wikipedia, it is extremely hard to understand the nature behind the Wikipedia phenomena. In this work, we try to study how to build bottom-up models based on autonomy-oriented computing (AOC) to better understand the nature and fundamental principles of social knowledge dynamics through a case study of Wikipedia.