Wikis ◾ 149
Spinellis and Louridas (2008) have noted that Wikipedia presents an important oppor-
tunity to examine these processes. In the past it has never been possible to examine the
emergence of scaling in big, real-world networks like the Web as there is no full record of
their evolution. Wikipedia now allows us to witness, and either validate or refute, prefer-
ential attachment at work on its graph, and provides an in vivo test of Barabási’s scale-free
network development theory. e authors put forward an adapted form of the preferential
attachment for Wikipedia and note evidence of a growth mechanism, whereby a reference
in an existing article to a non-existent article (a precursor to a ‘stub’) appears to be posi-
tively correlated ...