This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Angelika Mühlbauer; Kai Nissen

Wikipedia is a top-ten web site providing a community-built free encyclopedia. Its success hinges on the support of its volunteer contributors. And Wikipedia is a research object in several academic fields. Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., the German Wikimedia Chapter, is a partner in the EU-funded international research project RENDER – Reflecting knowledge diversity. With this participation we aim to support Wikipedia authors in editing and understanding the status of articles. This experience report focuses on our interaction with in particular the German Wikipedia community less on the project and its results.  We reached members of the Wikipedia community via several ways. In addition to the online channels the live meetings are of particular importance to construct an interested and active community. Additionally, we learned that it is very important to involve the users at an early stage. That helps to increase the acceptance and the willingness to support the project. If Wikipedians can understand a benefit of research results and developments for their daily life in Wikipedia or the advancement for whole project, they will be more willing to give innovations a try.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Michele Notari; Sonja Schär; Martin Schellenberg; Samuel Kai Wah Chu

In this article we describe how we developed and how we use a tool for teachers enhancing inter-group collaboration of learners using wikis in project-based learning settings with over 100 participants, where different groups of students de- velop similar projects and each project has an own wiki page. To achieve our goal we extended typical wiki functionality by using web widgets, mini applications embedded anywhere in the wiki environment using the iframe tag. Two different evaluation widgets (rating widget and ‘working progress‘ widget) are placed on each of the project pages. The project groups use the ‘working progress‘ widget to de- clare the amount of work done. The teacher and the rest of the learning community use the ‘rating‘ widget to rate the ongoing project work. A so called ‘meta widget‘ show- ing a summary of the results of the ‘rating‘ and ‘working progress‘ widget can be displayed on the start page of the learning community or if a project is divided in different milestones, on the page describing the goals and timeline for the milestone. Evaluation widgets and meta widget, which easily can be embedded by the teacher potentially all over the wiki pages, enhances visibility of quality and termina- tion degree of a project and enhance so the self, the tutor and the peer review opportunities in such large scale project based learning settings. The created evaluation widgets and meta widgets have been embedded in the wiki of a three months curriculum. The evaluation of utility and usability of the widgets is ongoing. The educational value of rating and reflecting about the working progress of a given task is discussed.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Edwin Chu; Michele Notari; Katherine Chen; Chi Keung Chan; Samuel Chu; Wendy Wu

This study investigates the use of wiki to support project-based learning (PBL) in 3 undergraduate courses of different disciplines: English Language Studies, Information Management, and Mechanical Engineering. This study takes a methodological triangulation approach that employs the use of questionnaires, interviews, and wiki activity logs. The level of activities and the types of core actions captured on wiki varied among the three groups of students. Students generally rated positively on the use of wiki to support PBL, while significant differences were found on 9 items (especially in the “Motivation” and “Knowledge Management” dimensions of the questionnaire) among students in the three different disciplines. Interviews revealed that these differences may be attributable to the variations in the natures and scopes of the PBL, as well as in the different emphases that students placed on the work presented on the wiki. This study may provide directions on the use of wiki in PBL in undergraduate courses.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Dario Taraborelli

Over the last years, Wikipedia has seen an explosion of academic interest, as indicated by a steadily increasing volume of scholarly publications. Due to its history, its size and the immediate availability of its data under open licenses, Wikipedia has served over time as a testbed for sociological and psychological theory; as the primary source of data for models of commons-based peer production and computer-supported collaboration; as a body of norms for research on the governance of online communities; or as a large multilingual corpus to mine, or against which to train text analysis algorithms. This explosion of academic interest reveals a gap between Wikipedia as a topic of scholarly research and Wikipedia as a living community in need of actionable solutions, facing real challenges and the first serious
growth and sustainability problem in its entire lifecycle. The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia communities have yet to find a viable model to leverage academic expertise to solve these challenges, in the same way that Wikimedia projects have effectively engaged with a large community of contributors and software developers to produce its contents and support its open source infrastructure. In this talk I will review recent research trends spanning scholarly work and internal research conducted at the Wikimedia Foundation, and how these relate to some of the most urgent needs of the Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation’s work priorities. I’ll discuss models that can support actionable research, as well as open opportunities for researchers and contributors  to collaborate on developing joint solutions and identifying new growth opportunities for WIkipedia and its communities.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Pockey Lam

From refurnishing old computers donated by companies and installing them with GNU/Linux and Free Software to developing and deploying open education resources and packaging free educational software together in migrant workers schools in Beijing. Pockey intends to share her experience doing those things and hope to get more people to review, improve and deliver this content to children who need it.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Anna Filippova

The voluntary and computer mediated nature of FOSS work present challenges to effective collaboration. Conflict within the team is one challenge that may arise due to limited communication channels and the distributed nature of work. As conflict may be both harmful and beneficial for a team, we propose a quantitative content analysis method to identify the various types of conflict that may occur during FOSS development. Additionally, we propose a related study to survey the relationship of these conflict types with FOSS team outputs, in order to better inform community design.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Bluma S Gelley

In my thesis, I explore the dynamics of gatekeeping in online peer-production communities, such as Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and various open-source software projects. How are standards set for content inclusion, and what mechanisms are used to find and remove content deemed inappropriate by the community? The subject of vandalism, or the malicious addition of “bad” content, has been widely studied. Here, I focus on content added in good faith that has nevertheless been judged inappropriate for the specific community. I also explore the possibility of using various automated tools to assist humans in gatekeeping tasks.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Christoph Hannebauer

This application to the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 doctoral symposium describes the current status of the doctoral thesis Wiki Development Environments. The doctoral thesis analyzes contribution barriers to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects and how to minimize these contribution barriers. The doctoral thesis contains a novel approach to lower these contribution barriers. This approach comprises the combination of a wiki system and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) into a Wiki Development Environment (WikiDE). A WikiDE is a web-based code editor that allows anonymous users to edit source code and contribute it to a FLOSS project.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Kim Osman

Wikipedia is an important institution and part of the new media landscape having evolved from the collaborative efforts of millions of distributed users. This research will examine how the issues that have been highlighted by conflict within the community have shaped the evolution of Wikipedia from an open wiki experiment to a global knowledge producer. Bringing together the concepts of interpretive flexibility and generative friction with existing theories on the evolution of institutions, the research aims to present possible futures for Wikipedia as part of not only the larger Wikimedia movement, but of an open and accessible web.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Laishan Tam

Based on the assumption that the underlying goal of communication is problem solving, my research focuses on how individuals express their nationalistic sentiments online when focusing events are reported in the news media. Focusing events are either initiated by a transnational organization operating in a foreign country or a government proposing a change in policy towards a foreign country, causing anger in the citizens of the foreign country concerned. By understanding how individuals are motivated to be engaged in communicative actions, my research seeks to examine the dynamics how become collectively engaged in online interactions until the problems are resolved.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.