WikiConv: A Corpus of the Complete Conversational History of a Large Online Collaborative Community
This provides researchers with an unprecedented dataset to study large-scale online collaboration processes, though it is incremental in offering more detailed data rather than a new method.
The authors tackled the problem of limited data on online collaborative conversations by creating WikiConv, a corpus containing the complete conversational history of Wikipedia contributors, including modifications and deletions, which revealed that community moderation of toxic behavior occurs at a higher rate than previously estimated.
We present a corpus that encompasses the complete history of conversations between contributors to Wikipedia, one of the largest online collaborative communities. By recording the intermediate states of conversations---including not only comments and replies, but also their modifications, deletions and restorations---this data offers an unprecedented view of online conversation. This level of detail supports new research questions pertaining to the process (and challenges) of large-scale online collaboration. We illustrate the corpus' potential with two case studies that highlight new perspectives on earlier work. First, we explore how a person's conversational behavior depends on how they relate to the discussion's venue. Second, we show that community moderation of toxic behavior happens at a higher rate than previously estimated. Finally the reconstruction framework is designed to be language agnostic, and we show that it can extract high quality conversational data in both Chinese and English.