Last but not least, the posters session will feature the 15 posters listed below, along with 8 more from the doctoral consortium selectees, with authors available and excited to chat with you about their work. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

• Wikipedia Category Visualization Using Radial Layout. Robert P. Biuk-Aghai and Felix Hon Hou Cheang.
• Wiki Refactoring: an Assisted Approach Based on Ballots. Oscar Diaz, Gorka Puente, and Cristóbal Arellano.
• Visualizing Author Contribution Statistics in Wikis Using an Edit Significance Metric. Peter Kin-Fong Fong and Robert P. Biuk-Aghai.
• The Center for Open Learning and Teaching. Pete Forsyth and Robert E. Cummings.
• “G1: Patent nonsense”: Participation and Outcomes in Wikipedia’s Article Deletion Processes. R. Stuart Geiger and Heather Ford.
• Wiki Architectures as Social Translucence Enablers. Stephanie Gokhman, David Mcdonald, and Mark Zachry.
• Failures of Social Production: Evidence from Wikipedia. Andreea Gorbatai.
• TWiki: A collaboration tool for the Large Hadron Collider. Peter Jones and Nils Hoimyr.
• A Scourge to the Pillar of Neutrality: A WikiProject Fighting Systemic Bias. Randall Livingstone.
• Places on the Map and in the Cloud: Representations of Locality and Geography in Wikipedia. Randall Livingstone.
• Exploring Linguistic Points of View of Wikipedia. Paolo Massa and Federico Scrinzi.
• Personality Traits, Feedback Mechanisms and their Impact on Motivation to Contribute to Wikis in Higher Education. Athanasios Mazarakis and Clemens Van Dinther.
• CoSyne: a Framework for Multilingual Content Synchronization of Wikis. Christof Monz, Vivi Nastase, Matteo Negri, Angela Fahrni, Yashar Mehdad, and Michael Strube.
• Incentivizing the ASL-STEM Forum. Kyle Rector, Richard Ladner, and Michelle Shepardson.
• Wiki as Business Application Platform: The MES Showcase. Christoph Sauer.

The demos session will feature four awesome demonstrations. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

Wikiotics: The Interactive Language Instruction Wiki

Ian Sullivan, James R. Garrison, Matthew Curinga

While most existing wiki systems are geared toward editing text documents, we have built Wikiotics to enable the collaborative creation of interactive multimedia materials most needed in language instruction. In our demonstration, we will show several types of interactive lessons that can be created from simple multimedia elements. We will also show the lesson creation/editing interfaces and how our smart phone app can simplify the process of capturing local media and integrating that new media into existing lessons.

PukiWiki-Java Connector, a Simple API for Saving Data of Java Programs on a Wiki

Takashi Yamanoue, Kentaro Oda, Koichi Shimozono

Experimental implementation of SDK for Java Programs, PukiWiki-Java Connector, which makes an illusion that wiki pages as persistent data store, is shown. A Java program of them can be running on a wiki page and it can save its data on the page. The Java program consists of PukiWiki which is a popular wiki in Japan, the plug-in which starts up Java Applets. A Java Applet with default access privilege cannot store its data at the local host. We have constructed the API for the applets to ease data persistent at a remote host. We also combined the API and the wiki system by introducing a wiki plugin and tags for starting up Java Applets. Applet generated persistent data resides in wiki texts side by side. We have successfully ported useful programs such as a simple text editor, a simple music editor, a simple draw program and programming environments in a PukiWiki system using this connector.

Collaborative Video Editing for Wikipedia

Michael Dale

Collaborative video for Wikipedia faces several challenges from social and community adoption to technology limitations. This presentation explores how each of these problems are being addressed. The presentation focuses on building a collaborative educational video community and how the html5 technology platform has evolved to better support rich media applications such as HTML5 video editing in the browser and standardization around the royalty free WebM video format. Finally we propose a in-browser collaborative video sequencer to enable broad participation in video editing within Wikimedia projects.

Wiki4EAM – Using Hybrid Wikis for Enterprise Architecture Management

Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a challenging task, modern enterprises have to face. This task is often addressed via heavy-weight and expensive EAM tools to collect, structure, visualize and analyze architectural information. A major problem in EAM is the mismatch between the existing unstructured information sources and the rigid information structures and collaboration mechanisms provided by today’s EAM tools.

To address this mismatch, researchers at Technische Universität München established in 2010 a community of experienced enterprise architects from 25 large German enterprises to pursue a different, wiki-based approach to EAM. The idea is to start with existing unstructured information sources captured as wiki pages (e.g., derived from Office documents) and then to incrementally and collaboratively enrich the wiki pages with attributes, types and integrity rules as needed for architecture modeling, visualization and analysis.

An off-the shelf commercial enterprise wiki (Tricia by infoAsset AG) provides the required incremental information structuring capabilities as so-called Hybrid Wikis. Customizable in-browser visualizations are provided by the System Cartography Tool developed at Technische Universität München.

The WikiSym 2011 Doctoral Symposium will be held as a pre-conference event on October 2nd, 2011 on the campus of Stanford University. Accepted PhD students have been invited to present their dissertation work and participate in discussions and feedback sessions with three faculty mentors:

• Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota
• Coye Cheshire, University of California at Berkeley
• Robert Biuk-Aghai, University of Macau

Students will also present their work as a poster during the conference, to encourage more feedback and discussions with the WikiSym research community.

Doctoral students studying any aspect of open collaboration were invited to apply for a position in the symposium. Applications were reviewed by the panel of faculty mentors and accepted students received travel support and conference registration courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Eight students were accepted to participate. Their names, affiliations, and research titles are as follows.

• Daniel Araya, University of Illinois. Learning and Education in an Age of Collective Intelligence
• Adam Fish, UCLA. Liberalism & Neoliberalism in Internet & Television Convergence
• Helge Hemmer, University of Wuppertal. Bridging the Gap between Research Lab, Student Experiments and Business Reality
• Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Syracuse University. Social Networking Technologies and Information Knowledge Sharing in Organizations
• Brian Keegan, Northwestern University. Breaking News on Wikipedia: Dynamics, Structures, and Practices of High-Tempo Collaboration
• Katherine Panciera, University of Minnesota. The When and Why of User Participation
• Heather Willever-Farr, Drexel University. Who Are We? Family History Peer Production on the Web
• Shun Ye, University of Maryland. Truck, Barter, and Exchange: An Empirical Investigation of P2P Barter Markets

The technical session Sustaining Open Collaboration will feature three presentations. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

Don’t Bite the Newbies: How Reverts Affect the Quantity and Quality of Wikipedia Work

Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur, John Riedl

Reverts are important to maintaining the quality of Wikipedia. They fix mistakes, repair vandalism, and help enforce policy. However, reverts can also be damaging, especially to the aspiring editor whose work they destroy. In this research we analyze 400,000 Wikipedia revisions to understand the effect that reverts had on editors. We seek to understand the extent to which they demotivate users, reducing the workforce of contributors, versus the extent to which they help users improve as encyclopedia editors. Overall we find that reverts are powerfully demotivating, but that their net influence is that more quality work is done in Wikipedia as a result of reverts than is lost by chasing editors away. However, we identify key conditions – most specifically new editors being reverted by much more experienced editors – under which reverts are particularly damaging. We propose that reducing the damage from reverts might be one effective path for Wikipedia to solve the newcomer retention problem.

Mentoring in Wikipedia: A Clash of Cultures

David R. Musicant, Yuqing Ren, James A. Johnson, John Riedl

The continuous success of Wikipedia depends upon its capability to recruit and engage new editors, especially those with new knowledge and perspectives. Yet Wikipedia over the years has become a complicated bureaucracy that may be difficult for newcomers to navigate. Mentoring is a practice that has been widely used in offline organizations to help new members adjust to their roles. In this paper, we draw insights from the offline mentoring literature to analyze mentoring practices in Wikipedia and how they influence editor behaviors. Our quantitative analysis of the Adopt-a-user program shows mixed success of the program. Communication between adopters and adoptees is correlated with the amount of article editing done by adoptees shortly after adoption. Our qualitative analysis of the communication between adopters and adoptees suggests that several key functions of mentoring are missing or not fulfilled consistently. Most adopters focus on establishing their legitimacy rather than acting proactively to guide, protect, and support the long-term growth of adoptees. We conclude with recommendations of how Wikipedia mentoring programs can evolve to take advantage of offline best practices.

“How Should I Go from __ to __ Without Getting Killed?” Motivation and Benefits in Open Collaboration

Katherine Panciera, Mikhil Masli, Loren Terveen

Many people rely on open collaboration projects to run their computer (Linux), browse the web (Mozilla Firefox), and get information (Wikipedia). While these projects are successful, many such efforts suffer from lack of participation. Understanding what motivates users to participate and the benefits they perceive from their participation can help address this problem. We examined these issues through a survey of contributors and information consumers in the Cyclopath geographic wiki. We analyzed subject responses to identify a number of key motives and perceived benefits. Based on these results, we articulate several general techniques to encourage more and new forms of participation in open collaboration communities. Some of these techniques have the potential to engage information consumers more deeply and productively in the life of open collaboration communities.