A Characterization of Wikipedia Content Based on Motifs in the Edit Graph

Wikipedia works because of the many eyes idea. Good Wikipedia pages are authoritative sources because a number of knowledgeable contributors have collaborated to produce an authoritative article on a topic. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the extent to which the many eyes idea is true for a specific article can be assessed by looking at the edit graph associated with that article, i.e. the network of contributors and articles. As a first step in this direction we show that different parts of Wikipedia have very different edit graph motif profiles. We show that articles on sociologists (a well-curated part of Wikipedia) are very different to articles on footballers in the English Premiership.