Authors: Róbert Sumi, Taha Yasseri, András Rung, András Kornai, János Kertész
We present a new, efficient method for automatically detecting severe conflicts `edit wars’ in Wikipedia and evaluate this method on six different language WPs. We discuss how the number of edits, reverts, the length of discussions, the burstiness of edits and reverts deviate in such pages from those following the general workflow, and argue that earlier work has significantly over-estimated the contentiousness of the Wikipedia editing process.
Note: This is a highly technical article. However, for non-techies there is enough material to make at least a scan worthwhile.