Evaluating authoritative sources using social networks: an insight from Wikipedia Nikolaos Th. Korfiatis Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Copenhagen, Denmark, and Marios Poulos and George Bokos Department of Archives and Library Sciences, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to evaluating contributions in collaborative authoring environments, and in particular, Wikis using social network measures. Design/methodology/approach – A social network model for Wikipedia has been constructed, and metrics of importance such as centrality have been defined. Data has been gathered from articles belonging to the same topic using a web crawler, in order to evaluate the outcome of the social network measures in the articles. Findings – Finds that the question of the reliability regarding Wikipedia content is a challenging one and as Wikipedia grows, the problem becomes more demanding, especially for topics with controversial views such as politics or history. Practical implications – It is believed that the approach presented here could be used to improve the authoritativeness of content found in Wikipedia and similar sources. Originality/value – This work tries to develop a network approach to the evaluation of Wiki contributions, and approaches the problem of quality Wikipedia content from a social network point of view. Keywords Social networks, Encyclopaedias Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction and background Since, the invention of writing as a method of encoding human knowledge, the preservation and dissemination of information and knowledge has become a matter of great importance to humanity. People, as intelligent entities, produce and consume information that is preserved in, and accessed from, various sources such as books, articles and encyclopaedias. Since, a high level of complexity characterizes the organization of information, reference works that assist the retrieval of relevant information resources are crucial for dissemination and further development of human knowledge in a particular subject. Encyclopaedias and dictionaries represent the major instances of such reference works, since their principal scope is to assist, through associative trailing, the retrieval of the relevant resources through a particular domain (collection of relevant lemmas). Visions of the world wide web such as the Memex, envisioned by Bush (1945), and the original intuition behind the design of the world wide web by Berners-Lee et al. (1994), tend to represent the world wide web as a huge encyclopaedia, where lemmas The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm OIR 30,3 252 Accepted March 2006 Online Information Review Vol. 30 No. 3, 2006 pp. 252-262 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1468-4527 DOI 10.1108/14684520610675780