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

Amir Azarbakht

How can we understand FOSS collaboration better? Can social issues that emerge be identified and addressed before it is too late? Can the community heal itself, become more transparent and inclusive, and promote diversity? We propose a technique to address these issues by quantitative analysis of social dynamics in FOSS communities. We propose using social network analysis metrics to identify growth patterns and unhealthy dynamics; giving the community a heads-up when they can still take action to ensure the sustainability of the 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.

Bluma S. Gelley, Torsten Suel

Wikipedia’s low barriers to participation have the unintended effect of attracting a large amount of inappropriate content. One form of inappropriate content is articles whose topics do not meet Wikipedia’s inclusion standards. The deletion of these articles wastes a large amount of time and effort that could be better spent improving Wikipedia’s quality. We propose to partially automate the task of detecting unencylopedic pages using machine learning. We examine three main deletion methods in Wikipedia and collect a dataset of articles, heretofore inaccessible, deleted using each method. We use the data to train classifiers to detect articles that should be deleted. We report precision of .986 and recall of .975 in the best case and high precision with lower, but still useful, recall, in the most difficult case. Our results show that it is possible to use an automated software system to assist humans in finding articles for deletion.

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.

Han-Teng Liao

Prior empirical and theoretical work has discussed the role of dominant search engine plays in the function of information gatekeeping on the Web, and there are reports on the high ranking of Wikipedia website among the search engine result pages (SERP). However, little research has been conducted on non-Google search engines and non-English versions of user-generated encyclopedias. This paper proposes a method to quantify the “display” gatekeeping differences of the SERP ranking and presents findings based on the Chinese SERP data. Based on 2,500 mainly-Chinese-language search queries, the data set includes the SERP outcome of four Chinese-speaking regions (mainland China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) provided by three major search engines (Baidu, and Google and Yahoo), covering over 97% of the search engine market in each region. The findings, analysed and visualized using network analysis techniques, demonstrate the followings: major user-generated encyclopedias are among the most visible; localization factors matter (certain search engine variants produce the most divergent outcomes, especially mainland Chinese ones). The indicated strong effects of “network gatekeeping” by search engines also suggest similar dynamics inside user-generated encyclopedias.

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.

Han-Teng Liao

Though open collaboration websites such as Wikipedia have attracted attention for their more inclusive and participatory potentials, it becomes increasingly clear that certain information filtering/control or gatekeeping mechanisms are set to render them manageable. Applying the network gatekeeping theory, this paper presents a case study of Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, focusing on their editorial policies and practices, which have not been systematically examined. Through a detailed analysis of editorial priorities, power users, and geo-linguistic arrangement over how, by whom and for whom and which types of information are processed, the findings show different bases and salience components for distinct network gatekeeping processes. In Chinese Wikipedia, filtering copyright-dubious materials and accommodating Chinese geo-linguistic variants are more salient, whereas censoring politically-sensitive content and enforcing a national cultural political framework of People’s Republic of China are more salient in Baidu Baike. The usefulness and limitations of applying network gatekeeping theory for open collaboration websites 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.

Junghong Choi; Bruce Ferwerda; Jungpil Hahn; Jinwoo Kim, Jae Yun Moon

The promise of collective intelligence emerging from voluntary participation, contribution and knowledge sharing brought about by ubiquitous information and communication technologies has recently attracted the attention of academics and practitioners alike. Of many related phenomena, open source software (OSS) development has been touted as one of the leading examples that speak to the potential of collective intelligence. Recently, the advent of novel open collaboration platforms for open source software development, such as Github, has prompted researchers to examine the impact of increased work transparency induced by the introduction of social features on voluntary self-organization and allocation of resources to projects. In this paper, we present both qualitative and quantitative analyses from which we derive some initial propositions regarding the impact of transparency on voluntary self-organization processes and decision mechanisms.

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.

Rina Singh; Jan Hidders; Feng Xia; Jialiang Kang

In the field of linked data, interlinking previously unlinked datasets that are available on the linked open cloud is still a big challenge. Silk is one of the tools that allow one to do interlinking between data items within different linked data sources. The main goal of our work is to simplify the process of specifying linking conditions using Silk. Specifying the correct  conditions in the Silk-LSL is a complex task where a helpful interface can make a large difference. In this work, we propose Silk Magic as a useful tool that is capable of guiding the users through the process of specifying linking conditions during the creation of the Silk LSL program and hence simplifies the task of writing Silk-LSL programs. The tool for example allows to display the conditions as an interactive tree, and offers suggestions for class selection conditions and step expressions in path expressions.

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.

Kwan Hui Lim, Amitava Datta and Michael Wise

This paper presents a preliminary study into the awarding of barnstars among Wikipedia editors to better understand their motivations in contributing to Wikipedia articles. We performed a comprehensive web-crawl on the entire Wikipedia and retrieved 21,299 barnstars that were awarded among 14,074 editors. In particular, we found that editors do not reciprocate with (awarding) a barnstar upon receiving one. Also, editors were more active in editing articles before awarding or receiving barnstars.

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.

Kwan Hui Lim, Amitava Datta

We present a framework for (automatically) classifying the relative interest of Twitter users using information from Wikipedia. Our proposed framework first uses Wikipedia to automatically classify a user’s celebrity followings into various interest categories, followed by determining the relative interest of the user with a weighting compared to his/her other interests. Our preliminary evaluation on Twitter shows that this framework is able to correctly classify users’ interests and that these users frequently converse about topics that both reflect their (detected) interest and a related real-life event.

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.

Florian Marienfeld; Ina Schieferdecker; Evanela Lapi; Nikolay Tcholtchev

A key challenge for open data portals is the aggregation of metadata from various data catalogs (on different administrative level or from different application fields) also knownas metadata harvesting.  This paper describes harvesting at the pilot of the German open government portal Gov-Data.de, which is scheduled to become the data portal forall German public administration levels. At the launch of the pilot portal in February 2013, eleven federal, state and local data catalogs where integrated and produced about 2,000 open data sets. In the meantime, the data sets were increased to over 3,100 data sets mainly due to improved harvesting capabilities of the portal. This paper discusses the central meta data schema and experiences with the different harvesting techniques that are in use at Gov-Data.de: CKAN-Harvest, CKAN-API, CSW-Harvest and JSON-Dump.

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.

Andrew Lih

This tutorial session addresses issues of multimedia and video co-creation in a wiki environment, using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons as an example.

Did you know that while English Wikipedia has over 4 million articles, only 0.1% of them have video? In 2013, the Wiki Makes Video project was started by Andrew Lih to encourage more video content creation. It was designed to further the work of earlier projects such as Lights Camera Wiki and Kaltura’s open source collaborative video editor work that had been started before 2010, but has stalled in recent years.

We demonstrate the challenges and best practices for video creation within a collaborative community, and how this project has used the idea of “”video patterns”” as an analog to “”programming patterns”” that originally spurred the development of wikis in the 1990s.

Topics include:
– Measuring the quantity and quality of video in Wikipedia’s articles
– How better video can be generated by contributors through teaching visual literacy using video patterns
– Overview of open technical standards being employed in Wikimedia Commons, and how to use them
– Researching and transcoding content from existing video repositories (Internet Archive, Library of Congress, et al)
– What barriers to participation might be, and how to encourage more visual content

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