This paper was accepted for publication in the Web Intelligence Conference 2006 in Hong Kong:
Title: Temporal Analysis of the Wikigraph (530 KB .pdf) [This is the author's version posted on my personal Website by the standard IEEE rules, not to be re-posted]
Authors: Luciana S. Buriol, Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Stefano Leonardi, Stefano Millozzi
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is an online encyclopedia, available in more than 100 languages and comprising over 1 million articles in its English version. If we consider each Wikipedia article as a node and each hyperlink between articles as an arc we have a Wikigraph , a graph that represents the link structure of Wikipedia.
The Wikigraph differs from other Web graphs studied in the literature by the fact that there are timestamps associated with each node. The timestamps indicate the creation and update dates of each page, and this allows us to do a detailed analysis of the Wikipedia evolution over time.
In the first part of this study we characterize this evolution in terms of users, editions and articles; in the second part, we depict the temporal evolution of several topological properties of the Wikigraph. The insights obtained from the Wikigraphs can be applied to large Web graphs from which the temporal data is usually not available.
The conclusions of the paper point to both signs of growth and maturity in the current Wikipedia:
Signs of transient regime (growth):
Signs of permanent regime (maturity):