Taha Yasseri
Taha Yasseri is a physicist and sociologist known for his research on crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and computational social science. He is a full professor at the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Yasseri is one of the leading scholars in computational social science and his research has been widely covered in mainstream media.
Yasseri's research investigates complex systems, computational social science, network science, social data science and human dynamics.
Education
Yasseri was educated at Sharif University of Technology and the University of Göttingen where he was awarded a PhD in theoretical physics of complex systems for research supervised by.Research and career
Yasseri was a research fellow in humanities and social sciences at Wolfson College, Oxford, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for data science and artificial intelligence, a senior research fellow in computational social science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and a professor of sociology at University College Dublin. He is the inaugural Workday Chair of Technology and Society at Trinity College Dublin. In 2025, he was made a fellow of Trinity College Dublin.Wikipedia
Yasseri has studied the statistical trends of systemic bias at Wikipedia introduced by editing conflicts and their resolution. His research examined the counterproductive work behavior of edit warring. Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo" operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive behavior at Wikipedia and relied instead on the statistical measurement of detecting "reverting/reverted pairs" or "mutually reverting edit pairs". Such a "mutually reverting edit pair" is defined where one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's three largest conflict rates belonged to the articles George W. Bush, Anarchism and Muhammad. By comparison, for the German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for the articles covering Croatia, Scientology and 9/11 conspiracy theories.In a study published by PLoS ONE in 2012 he estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple English Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation hoped to increase the number of editors in the Global South to 37% by 2015.