Thermodynamic Principles in Social Collaborations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a thermodynamic framework to analyze social collaboration systems, specifically Wikipedia, by modeling editor activity and system efficiency through entropy and energy concepts, revealing increased efficiency and correlation with readership.

Contribution

It develops a novel thermodynamic approach to quantify efficiency and quality in social content production, applying it to Wikipedia's long-term data.

Findings

Wikipedia's efficiency increased over eight years

Entropy-based efficiency correlates with readership

System evolution follows power-law distribution changes

Abstract

A thermodynamic framework is presented to characterize the evolution of efficiency, order, and quality in social content production systems, and this framework is applied to the analysis of Wikipedia. Contributing editors are characterized by their (creative) energy levels in terms of number of edits. We develop a definition of entropy that can be used to analyze the efficiency of the system as a whole, and relate it to the evolution of power-law distributions and a metric of quality. The concept is applied to the analysis of eight years of Wikipedia editing data and results show that (1) Wikipedia has become more efficient during its evolution and (2) the entropy-based efficiency metric has high correlation with observed readership of Wikipedia pages.