  Wikipedia serves as a good example of how editors collaborate to form and
maintain an article. The relationship between editors, derived from their
sequence of editing activity, results in a directed network structure called
the revision network, that potentially holds valuable insights into editing
activity. In this paper we create revision networks to assess differences
between controversial and non-controversial articles, as labelled by Wikipedia.
Originating from complex networks, we apply motif analysis, which determines
the under or over-representation of induced sub-structures, in this case triads
of editors. We analyse 21,631 Wikipedia articles in this way, and use principal
component analysis to consider the relationship between their motif subgraph
ratio profiles. Results show that a small number of induced triads play an
important role in characterising relationships between editors, with
controversial articles having a tendency to cluster. This provides useful
insight into editing behaviour and interaction capturing counter-narratives,
without recourse to semantic analysis. It also provides a potentially useful
feature for future prediction of controversial Wikipedia articles.
