The idea behind this first hypothesis was to discover if the Wikinews network benefits from the work of a relatively small number of very active contributors or if the extend of contributions is more or less the same for all users.

Our expectation was that there would be some very active users, while on the other hand there would be users who cease quickly after having contributed maybe only once. By analyzing the social structure of Wikinews using TeCFlow, we expected to be able to make a more precise statement and to corroborate the hypothesis.

We used TeCFlow’s Static View Function in order to generate an overall view of the social network, anticipating that this would help to identify the key contributors by means of their centrality in the network. After coloring the actors according to their Betweenness Centrality the – due to the amount of data – very complex network gained clarity (Figure 1). It turned out that there are indeed only very few central users in the Wikinews network.

What could not resolved is whether the high centrality is a result of contributing more articles than others, or whether it must be attributed to editing or even resetting articles in a policing manner. The fact that most of the very central users act as so called “admins” for Wikinews and that they are granted this status by the community based on their activity, however indicates that the former is true.

Figure 1