Measuring Qualities of Articles Contributed by Online Communities

Using open source Web editing software (e.g., wiki), online community users can now easily edit, review and publish articles collaboratively. While much useful knowledge can be derived from these articles, content users and critics are often concerned about their qualities. In this paper, we develop two models, namely basic model and peer review model, for measuring the qualities of these articles and the authorities of their contributors. We represent collaboratively edited articles and their contributors in a bipartite graph. While the basic model measures an article's quality using both the authorities of contributors and the amount of contribution from each contributor, the peer review model extends the former by considering the review aspect of article content. We present results of experiments conducted on some Wikipedia pages and their contributors. Our result show that the two models can effectively determine the articles' qualities and contributors' authorities using the collaborative nature of online communities