A Latent Space Analysis of Editor Lifecycles in Wikipedia

Collaborations such as Wikipedia are a key part of the valueof the modern Internet. At the same time there is concern that thesecollaborations are threatened by high levels of member turnover. In thispaper we borrow ideas from topic analysis to editor activity on Wikipediaover time into a latent space that oers an insight into the evolvingpatterns of editor behavior. This latent space representation reveals anumber of dierent categories of editor (e.g. content experts, social net-workers) and we show that it does provide a signal that predicts aneditor's departure from the community. We also show that long termeditors gradually diversify their participation by shifting edit preferencefrom one or two namespaces to multiple namespaces and experience rel-atively soft evolution in their editor proles, while short term editorsgenerally distribute their contribution randomly among the namespacesand experience considerably uctuated evolution in their editor proles.