Thermodynamic principles in social collaborations

Details

2012 April 18-20; Boston, MA USA. Date of Talk: 4/18/2012

Speakers

Zhang, Ying
Peter Pirolli
Event

Thermodynamic principles in social collaborations

A thermodynamic framework is presented to characterize the evolution of efficiency, order, and quality in social content production systems, and this framework is applied to the analysis of Wikipedia. Contributing editors are characterized by their (creative) energy levels in terms of number of edits. We develop a definition of entropy that can be used to analyze the efficiency of the system as a whole, and relate it to the evolution of power-law distributions and a metric of quality. The concept is applied to the analysis of eight years of Wikipedia editing data and results show that (1) Wikipedia has become more efficient during its evolution and (2) the entropy-based efficiency metric has high correlation with observed readership of Wikipedia pages.

Additional information

Focus Areas

Our work is centered around a series of Focus Areas that we believe are the future of science and technology.

FIND OUT MORE
Licensing & Commercialization Opportunities

We’re continually developing new technologies, many of which are available for Commercialization.

FIND OUT MORE
News

PARC scientists and staffers are active members and contributors to the science and technology communities.

FIND OUT MORE