Wikis as digital ecosystems: An analysis based on authorship

Wikis, best represented by the popular and highly successful Wikipedia system, have established themselves as important components of a collaboration infrastructure. We suggest that the complex network of user-contributors in volunteer-contributed wikis constitutes a digital ecosystem that bears all the characteristics typical of such systems. This paper presents an analysis supporting this notion based on significance of authorship within the wiki. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that large volunteer-contributed wikis are digital ecosystems, and thus that the findings from the digital ecosystems research stream are applicable to this type of system.