Thermodynamic Principles in Social Collaborations
A thermodynamic framework is presented to characterize the evolution of eciency, order, and quality in social content production systems, and this framework is applied to the analysis of Wikipedia. Contributing editors are characterized by their (creative) energy levels in terms of number of edits. We develop a denition of entropy that can be used to analyze the eciency of the system as a whole, and relate it to the evolution of powerlaw distributions and a metric of quality. The concept is applied to the analysis of eight years of Wikipedia editing data and results show that (1) Wikipedia has become more ecient during its evolution and (2) the entropy-based eciency metric has high correlation with observed readership of Wikipedia pages.