Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks The.pdfVIP

PHYSICAL REVIEW E 74, 036116 2006 Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: The internet encyclopedia Wikipedia A. Capocci,1 V. D. P. Servedio,1,2 F. Colaiori,3 L. S. Buriol,2,4 D. Donato,2 S. Leonardi,2 and G. Caldarelli1,3 1 Centro Studi e Ricerche E. Fermi, Compendio Viminale, Roma, Italy 2 Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Via Salaria 113, 00198 Roma, Italy 3 CNR-INFM(SMC) Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, 00185, Roma, Italy 4 Computer Science Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil Received 17 February 2006; revised manuscript received 21 July 2006; published 25 September 2006 We present an analysis of the statistical properties and growth of the free on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. By describing topics by vertices and hyperlinks between them as edges, we can represent this encyclopedia as a directed graph. The topological properties of this graph are in close analogy with those of the World Wide Web, despite the very different growth mechanism. In particular, we measure a scale-invariant distribution of the in and out degree and we are able to reproduce these features by means of a simple statistical model. As a major consequence, Wikipedia growth can be described by local rules such as the preferential attachment mechanism, though users, who are responsible of its evolution, can act globally on the network.