Title: Can Who-Edits-What Predict Edit Survival?,
Abstract: As the number of contributors to online peer-production systems grows, it
becomes increasingly important to predict whether the edits that users make
will eventually be beneficial to the project. Existing solutions either rely on
a user reputation system or consist of a highly specialized predictor that is
tailored to a specific peer-production system. In this work, we explore a
different point in the solution space that goes beyond user reputation but does
not involve any content-based feature of the edits. We view each edit as a game
between the editor and the component of the project. We posit that the
probability that an edit is accepted is a function of the editor's skill, of
the difficulty of editing the component and of a user-component interaction
term. Our model is broadly applicable, as it only requires observing data about
who makes an edit, what the edit affects and whether the edit survives or not.
We apply our model on Wikipedia and the Linux kernel, two examples of
large-scale peer-production systems, and we seek to understand whether it can
effectively predict edit survival: in both cases, we provide a positive answer.
Our approach significantly outperforms those based solely on user reputation
and bridges the gap with specialized predictors that use content-based
features. It is simple to implement, computationally inexpensive, and in
addition it enables us to discover interesting structure in the data.