** NOTE: The images in this post have been lost in a server migration.**

A little late in coming, but here’s a pretty picture based on a conference submission I’m preparing.

1. Taking the revision history of all 607 unique editors who contributed to the article on Pope Francis after 1 Jan 2013.
2. Get all the other 22,225 articles they revised since the beginning of the year.
3. From this two-mode network, project a one-mode article-article network where one article is linked to another article if they share an editor in common.
4. Filter out all the edges where there is only a single editor in common leaving articles than have been edited by two or more editors in common and remove the resulting isolates.
5. Identify the largest connected component consisting of 2,671 articles and 3,144 edges.
6. Visualize! Nodes are sized based on degree and colored based on modularity class. Data (including GraphML files for both the complete graph and LCC, a larger PNG, and a SVG) available here.

There’s a lot going on there and much more to see by looking around the full image, but I’ll give a few highlights.

The articles with the strongest tie (most editors in common)? A lot of ties between Pope Francis and other papal and Catholic-related articles round out the top 10 as one would expect, but there are some interesting outliers as well: Pier Luigi Bersani and Italian general election, 2013 with 42 editors in common, actually takes first and 2013 Malmö FF season and 2012–13 Svenska Cupen comes in 4th. This is to say these random articles shared at least 2 editors with the Pope Francis article but were themselves the subject of intense co-editing.

(u'Pier Luigi Bersani', u'Italian general election, 2013', {'weight': 42}),
(u'List of popes', u'Pope Francis', {'weight': 37}),
(u'Papal conclave, 2013', u'Pope Francis', {'weight': 31}),
(u'2013 Malmxf6 FF season', u'2012u201313 Svenska Cupen', {'weight': 26}),
(u'Pope Benedict XVI', u'Pope Francis', {'weight': 24}),
(u'Papal conclave, 2013', u'Pope Benedict XVI', {'weight': 22}),
(u'Pope Benedict XVI', u'Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI', {'weight': 22}),
(u'Papal conclave, 2013',u'Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI',{'weight': 20}),
(u'South American dreadnought race',u'Argentineu2013Chilean naval arms race',{'weight': 18}),
(u'Timeline of Vietnamese history',u'First Chinese domination of Vietnam',{'weight': 18})


Of course, a lot of co-authorship was around other Catholic topics: the Papal Enclave, Pope Benedict XVI and his resignation, and other cardinal electors:

There is a lot of co-authorship around other topics that were also in the news:

Other topics of current events, but not peripheral to these coauthorship patterns include updates to Swedish football club rosters as well as editing of articles about members of the Baathist regime in Syria. Strangely, these two disparate topics are clustered together (both by modularity and by layout) suggesting they draw from a similar communities of editors.

If you want to know more, hopefully our paper will be accepted and I can share it 🙂