Social Network Analysis in Community-Built Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 52

Fig. 3.1 Basic categories of
data in community-built
databases
of this information and possibly also show the path which leads to successful and
high-quality CBD.
User-specific data can be evaluated effectively using purely statistical approaches,
so we do not discuss them further in this chapter. A similar situation holds for the
database-specific data, because they heavily depend on the nature of a particular
database type.
This chapter is organized as follows. At first we mention some of the biggest
CBD. Then we discuss some of their common features related to the social aspects.
The next section is dedicated to understanding these databases in terms of the SNA,
various types of data and their visualization. The latter part of this chapter presents
several practical applications using the social perspective in order to mine informa-
tion from CBD. Illustrative experiments are accompanied by basic notions of
theory. We would like to thank the editors of this topic and reviewers of this chapter
for their valuable suggestions and comments.
3.1.1 Community-Built Databases Brief Survey
Wikipedia is surely the biggest success of CBD. Currently it is available in more
than 270 languages containing more than 15 million articles created by 90,000
contributors. 1 English Wikipedia, the largest language edition, has more than three
million articles. The success and support of volunteers have also made possible the
existence of other wiki projects such as Wiktionary, WikiBooks, Wikimedia Com-
mons, etc.
Since Wikipedia is not aimed at one specific type of data, it clearly conflicts with
the specialized CBD. Regardless of this fact, many of them were able to grow to
respectable sizes.
1 According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:About