The evolution of the ’opinion’ of the editors (light blue) and the article (green) over time. Starting from three fractions of editors, a consensus builds after changes in the article which help the editors to converge.
Researchers have produced a mathematical model to describe how conflicting opinions are resolved over articles that appear on Wikipedia, the collaboratively-edited encyclopaedia. The study maps the evolution of opinion over time, showing that even widely diverging opinions eventually converge. The researchers say this pattern in collective human behaviour is reminiscent of the interaction of particles in physics, such as when wind-blown grains of sand eventually create sand dunes. The study also notes that the collaborative nature of a medium like Wikipedia tempers extremes of opinion. The model, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters , was constructed by a research team, including Taha Yasseri from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, as well as researchers from Hungary, Finland and Spain. Yasseri says: 'We believe this model exhibits some interesting behaviour that for the first time can qualitatively capture key characteristics of off-line conflicts 'The competition and co-existence of local and global interactions play an important role in physics. For example, we have already observed this in the creation of sand dunes, which are not solely formed by the local interaction of sand grains with neighbouring grains but also the wind, which brings into play global and long-range effects.
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