Causal evidence for social group sizes from Wikipedia editing data

Human communities have self-organizing properties in which specific Dunbar Numbers may be invoked to explain group attachments.  By analyzing Wikipedia editing histories across a wide range of subject pages, we show that there is an emergent coherence in the size of transient groups formed to edit the content of subject texts, with two peaks averaging at around $N=8$ for the size corresponding to maximal  contention, and at around $N=4$ as a regular team. These values are consistent with the observed sizes of conversational groups, as well as the hierarchical structuring of Dunbar graphs.  We use the Promise Theory model of bipartite trust to derive a scaling law that  fits the data and may apply to all group size distributions, when based on attraction to a seeded group process.  In addition to  providing further evidence that even spontaneous communities of strangers are self-organizing, the results have important implications for the governance of the Wikipedia commons and for the se..., Data sets are collected by direct scanning of Wikipedia's open platform data. The data have been processed by code decribed at https://github.com/markburgess/Trustability and documented in detail at http://markburgess.org/trustproject.html, , # Causal evidence for social group sizes from Wikipedia editing data

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fn2z34v36](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fn2z34v36)

This is part of a project to formulate a practical Promise Theory model of trust for our Internet and machine enabled age. It is not related to blockchain or so-called trustless technologies, and is not specifically based on cryptographic techniques. Rather it addresses trustworthiness as an assessment of reliability in keeping specific promises and trust as a tendency to monitor or oversee these processes.

The files measure data grabbed by parsing the history logs of many Wikipedia pages. While looking for evidence of signatures about trust, we discovered evidence of ad hoc group formation in users editing pages, consistent with the Dunbar number hypothesis.

We provide the cache of data used in our paper here, in accordance with procedure, but we encourage anyone to collect data themselves using the code referred to below or their o...