Collective Phenomena and Non-Finite State Computation in a Human Social System

Abstract

We investigate the computational structure of a paradigmatic example of distributed social interaction: that of the open-source Wikipedia community. We examine the statistical properties of its cooperative behavior, and perform model selection to determine whether this aspect of the system can be described by a finite-state process, or whether reference to an effectively unbounded resource allows for a more parsimonious description. We find strong evidence, in a majority of the most-edited pages, in favor of a collective-state model, where the probability of a "revert" action declines as the square root of the number of non-revert actions seen since the last revert. We provide evidence that the emergence of this social counter is driven by collective interaction effects, rather than properties of individual users.

23 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; to appear in PLoS ONE

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• Statistical Signatures of Structural Organization: The case of long memory in renewal processes
• Reading the Source Code of Social Ties
• Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia
• Major Transitions in Political Order
• Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
• Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering
• Understanding the Predictive Power of Computational Mechanics and Echo State Networks in Social Media