# Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia:
## 3 Results
### Epoch Detection  
The distribution of relaxation times, \(\tau\), is shown in Figure 2. For all sixty-two pages, \(\tau\) is exceptionally long. The average relaxation time in our sample is 698 steps, corresponding to a \(\lambda_{2}\) of roughly \(1-10^{-3}\); the median is 287 steps. The effect size is large; the median relaxation time for the null model is only 12 steps, and for any particular page, the observed relaxation time is on average 50 times longer than the null expectation. In the majority of cases (52 of 62), there is significant evidence that global machine structure, in addition to transition sparseness, is leading to these long relaxation times. Using Viterbi reconstruction, we can infer the actual transitions that occur on the pages. Coarse-graining subspace transitions to remove flickering, we find a total of 1390 transition events over the sixty-two pages. The average trapping time, page-by-page, is 1201 steps or 190 days. Trapping times are longer than relaxation times. Epoch switching events in our sample do not appear to be concentrated at any special range of time in the last fifteen years; the distribution of switching times is indistinguishable, in a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, from the distribution of edit times in general. The two subspaces have distinct levels of expected reverts. We refer to the subspace with higher levels of reverting as \"high-conflict\" (type one) and the one with lower levels of reverting as \"low-conflict\" (type two). We emphasize that reverts track only one feature of conflict and that the lower conflict subspace not only shows significant amounts of reverting, but also that (as we shall see) the lower conflict subspace may have more examples of norm-violating conflict. We suggest use of the phrase \"type one conflict\", rather than \"conflict associated with being in the higher-conflict subspace\" (and similarly for \"type two conflict\") for simplicity. While we use this language informally, we refer the reader to our discussion above regarding the limitations of reverts as a tracer of more elaborate notions of conflict. On average, the higher-conflict subspace is roughly 2.5 times more revert-prone than the \"low-conflict\" subspace. Residency times are also slightly longer in the high-conflict state (207 days vs. 149 days). When the system is trapped in the higher conflict subspace, we find that editing usually,  
Figure 2: Relaxation time, \(\tau\), for the sixty-two pages in our sample (solid line). Times are exceptionally long, an average of 698 steps, and, on average, a factor of 50 times longer than expected for Markov models with similar sparseness (dotted line). The longest trapping times are for the pages associated with the Gaza War, the Russo-Georgian War, and the page describing Wikipedia itself. though not always, accelerates: the spacing between edits declines. In the mean, across all pages, users edit on average 2.6 times faster when in the higher conflict subspace; 46 of the 62 pages show this acceleration (high conflict faster than low conflict). The differences in edit rate are driven in part by a long tail of wait times; if we consider not the average time between edits, but the median time between edits, the difference shrinks, and only 37 of 62 pages show acceleration. An example of the distribution of edit timescales is shown in Figure 3, for the case of the [PERSON] page; when the system is in the high-conflict subspace, edits occur almost every three minutes, compared to once every 16 min in the low-conflict subspace. Other differences appear; 37% of edits are made by unregistered users (\"IP addresses\") in the high-conflict subspace, compared to 21% of edits in the low-conflict subspace. As can be seen in the sample Viterbi reconstruction in Figure 1, the transition from one state to the other is characterized by more than just an increase in revert rate. High- and low-conflict subspaces are characterized by very different interaction styles. Table 2 shows the characteristic motifs over the full set of 62 pages.