Visualizing co-evolution of individual and collective knowledge

Abstract

This paper describes how processes of knowledge building with wikis may be visualized, citing the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an example. The underlying theoretical basis is a framework for collaborative knowledge building with wikis that describes knowledge building as a co-evolution of individual and collective knowledge. These co-evolutionary processes may be visualized graphically, applying methods from social network analysis, especially those methods that take dynamic changes into account. For this purpose, we have undertaken to analyse, on the one hand, the temporal development of a Wikipedia article and related articles that are linked to this core article. On the other hand, we analysed the temporal development of those users who worked on these articles. The resulting graphics show an analogous process, both with regard to the articles that refer to the core article and to the users involved. These results provide empirical support for the co-evolution model. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.