# Understanding the Signature of Controversial Wikipedia Articles through Motifs in Editor Revision Networks

## TL;DR

This study analyzes editor interaction patterns in Wikipedia articles using motif analysis of revision networks, revealing distinct clustering in controversial articles that could aid in predicting controversy.

## Contribution

The paper introduces motif analysis of editor revision networks to distinguish controversial from non-controversial Wikipedia articles, offering a novel approach without semantic analysis.

## Key findings

- Controversial articles show more clustering of editor interactions.
- A small set of triads significantly characterizes controversy.
- Motif profiles can potentially predict article controversy.

## Abstract

Wikipedia serves as a good example of how editors collaborate to form and maintain an article. The relationship between editors, derived from their sequence of editing activity, results in a directed network structure called the revision network, that potentially holds valuable insights into editing activity. In this paper we create revision networks to assess differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, as labelled by Wikipedia. Originating from complex networks, we apply motif analysis, which determines the under or over-representation of induced sub-structures, in this case triads of editors. We analyse 21,631 Wikipedia articles in this way, and use principal component analysis to consider the relationship between their motif subgraph ratio profiles. Results show that a small number of induced triads play an important role in characterising relationships between editors, with controversial articles having a tendency to cluster. This provides useful insight into editing behaviour and interaction capturing counter-narratives, without recourse to semantic analysis. It also provides a potentially useful feature for future prediction of controversial Wikipedia articles.