1. Wikipedia as social network Dan Cosley Kicking the ball off for Ted Welser, Gueorgi Kossinets, Vladimir Barash, Laura Black, and a cast of thousands

4. Why? Comments on editing Who, when Downloadable! 80M edits Nov 2006 100M edits Jan 2007 What: contents of each revision

5. Edits aren’t just to articles. People discuss article creation in the “Talk namespace”. Each article potentially has a corresponding talk page.

6. Article talk pages are conversational, covering questions of fact, of resolving viewpoints, of sources, of policy.

7. Wikipedia is not just articles. Users have pages, and many engage in self-disclosure, via text, “userboxes”, etc.

8. Users talk to each other too, on “User Talk” pages. This is a welcome I received long ago.

9. Users talk a lot About articles About and with each other Encouragement Informal communication

10. Larger-scale community structures also exist, and are represented as pages in the “Wikipedia” namespace.

11. WikiProjects gather groups of like- minded people around a common topic or kind of work (like copyediting)

12. Policies, roles, issues of quality, conflict resolution, and culture are all represented explicitly.

13. AB you C me Where’s the social network? Indirectly, through writing articles. Or maybe B is a request for adminship, or a Wikiproject, creating ties via group participation.

14. you me Wikipedia as a social network? A A’s talk page More directly, through talking about articles

15. me My talk page Even more directly: user talk you Your talk page Many ways to think of building a network Even more directly, through user-user conversation.

16. Using the social network …to increase participation (me) …to study diffusion of ideas, memes (Ted Welser) …to estimate article quality (Gueorgi Kossinets) …to study policies and politics (Laura Black) …to help predict project success (Connie Yuan) …to order idea links v. social links (Vladimir Barash)