An empirical study of knowledge collaboration networks in virtual community: Based on wiki

Wikipedia is a typical Knowledge collaboration-oriented virtual community. Yet its collaboration mechanism remains unclear. This empirical study explores Wikipedia's archive data and proposes a knowledge collaboration network model. The analysis indicates that wiki-based knowledge collaboration network is a type of BA scale-free network which obeys power-law distribution. On the other hand, this network is characterized with higher stable clustering coefficient and smaller average distance, thus present obvious small-world effect. Moreover, the network topology is non-hierarchical becuase clustering coefficients and degrees don't conform to power -law distribution. The above results profile the collaboration network and figure the key network property. Thus we can use the model to describe how people interact with each other and to what extend they collaborate on content creation.