6. Structure-Based Features for Predicting the Quality of Articles in Wikipedia

Success of Wikipedia is decidedly due to the free availability of high quality articles across many different expertise areas. If most of these resolute collaborations between authoritative users might constitute referenceable sources, Wikipedia is not sheltered from well-identified problems regarding articles quality, e.g., reputability of third-party sources and vandalism. Because of the huge number of articles and the intensive edit rate, it is not reasonable to even consider the manual evaluation of the content quality of each article. In this paper, we tackle the problem of modeling and predicting the quality of articles in collaborative platforms. We propose a quality model integrating both temporal and structural features captured from the implicit peer review process enabled by Wikipedia. A generic HITS-like framework is developed and able to capture both the quality of the content and the authority of the associated authors. Notably, a mutual reinforcement principle held between articles quality and author’s authority is exploited in order to take advantage of the collaborative graph generated by the users. Experiments conducted on a set of representative data from Wikipedia show the effectiveness of the computed indicators both in an unsupervised and supervised scenario.