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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010LANGUAGES AND WIKIPEDIA: CULTURAL EVOLUTIONINCREASES STRUCTUREJulia Kasmire and Alfredas ChmieliauskasTU Delft, Energy & Industry SectionJaffalaan 5, 2628 BX Delft, The NetherlandsABSTRACTNatural languages and Wikipedia may both be evolving through the Iterated Learning Model, a cultural evolutionmechanism that relies on iterated learning, a transmission bottleneck, and a structured meaning space, but does notrequire a competitive advantage for individual speakers or Wikipedia articles exhibiting more structure than others. Thispaper examines evidence that the evolution of structure on Wikipedia meets the same criteria as have been established forthe ILM in the domain of language, and provides indications that Wikipedia is actually evolving through this mechanism.As a more readily studied example of cultural evolution, Wikipedia may provide answers to the evolution of structurethat languages cannot address.KEYWORDSCultural evolution, structure, Wikipedia, iteration, learning1. INTRODUCTIONWikipedia is gaining structure, some of which has provoked the protests of editors and users. This structuralincrease may be more than just an annoying fad because similarities between Wikipedia and humanlanguages suggest that the same mechanisms may be driving evolution of structure in both domains. Typicalinterpretations of evolution rely on a net benefit to individuals with a variation to drive the spread of thatvariation, but structure in Wikipedia and human languages does not provide such a benefit. Only after thestructures are well established can the benefits to the total system be seen, with more structured exampleshaving little or no net benefit. The collective benefits of a shared, structured system do not justify theevolution of this structure according to simplistic interpretations of evolution, yet the existence of bothstructured languages and structure in Wikipedia shows that there must be a way.However, the Iterated Learning Model (ILM) is a cultural evolution mechanism that does not rely on arelative benefit for individuals and which has been used to explain the evolution of linguistic structure. TheILM can also be applied to Wikipedia because Wikipedia meets all the necessary criteria and shows somepreliminary indications that the currently developing structure matches expectations from the ILM.Wikipedia, and other documented open source information portals, therefore represent new and valuablemedia for exploring cultural evolution behavior and dynamics, may be easier to study than language or othertypical subjects of cultural evolution models, and may help answer difficult questions for those fields.2. WHAT IS STRUCTURE ON WIKIPEDIA?Exploration of the English language Wikipedia and its version history, either through the internet or thecomplete Wikipedia articles and version history data dump (http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/) showsthat when Wikipedia began in 2001 (Article: Wikipedia., 2010), there was very little structure in individualarticles. Instead articles were relatively holistic, meaning that the information was presented as a whole,without subdivisions, structure, or explicit relationships between the different kinds of information containedin the article. These early articles usually covered a single topic in as much detail as was available or desired339