Analisi dell'evoluzione di una rete: Il caso di Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is nowadays one of the most used source of knowledge and information, containing millions of articles for a large variety of topics. It can be represented as an evolving directed graph where articles are expressed as nodes and hyperlinks between them as edges. The present work firstly studies the statistical properties that characterised the growth of such network over the last two decades, analysing both macroscopic and microscopic change of its topology and comparing it with other well-know evolving networks, as the World Wide Web. Secondly, the problem of community detection in evolving networks is presented together with performances of different approaches and specific applications to understand how the structures and the properties of nodes communities changed over time.