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

Brian Keegan

Despite the amount of 9/11-related content and enthusiasm with which current news events were promoted on the Wikipedia homepage, the role of this content in the project raised complex questions about the identity and boundaries of the project itself. The outcomes of these debates influenced policies about Wikipedia’s approaches to covering current news events and the types of content it would permit to be included. The scale of editors’ response to the 9/11 attacks motivated the development of policies that served to explicitly demarcate the boundaries of Wikipedia’s encyclopedic identity as distinct from a news source or a memorial site. These initiatives reveal tensions as the community negotiated the role and scope of current news events.

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.

R.Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker

In the first half of 2011, one of Wikipedia’s most prolific counter-vandalism bots (or automated software agents) went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. In this paper, we use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s heterogeneous quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time to revert an edit was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were eventually reverted. This suggests that other agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a much slower rate.

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.

Michael Gilbert, Jonathan Morgan, David McDonald, Mark Zachry

In online groups, increasing explicit coordination can increase group cohesion and member productivity. On Wikipedia, groups called WikiProjects employ a variety of explicit coordination mechanisms to motivate and structure member contribution, with the goal of creating and improving articles related to particular topics. However, while explicit coordination works well for coordinating article-level actions, coordinating group tasks and tracking progress towards group goals that involve tracking hundreds or thousands of articles over time requires different coordination strategies. To lower the coordination cost of monitoring and task-routing, WikiProjects centralize coordination activity on WikiProject pages – “micro-sites” which provide a centralized repository of project tools, tasks and targets, and discussion for explicit group coordination. These tools can facilitate shared awareness of member and non-member editing activity on articles that the project cares about. However, whether these tools are as effective at motivating members as explicit coordination, and whether they elicit the same kind of contributions, has not been studied. In this study, we examine one such tool, Hot Articles, and compare its effect on the editing behavior of WikiProject members with a common explicit coordination mechanism: making edit requests on the project talk page.

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.

Masahiro Hamasaki, Masataka Goto

This paper describes a music browsing assistance service, Songrium (http://songrium.jp), that helps a user enjoy songs while seeing visualization of open collaboration. Songrium focuses on open collaboration for music content creation on the most popular Japanese video-sharing service. Since this open collaboration generates more than half a million video clips with a rich variety of music content, we call it massive open collaboration. To develop a shared understanding of this collaboration we have analyzed, we developed Songrium that visualizes relations among both original songs and derivative works generated from the collaboration. Songrium also features a social annotation framework to verbalize and share various relations among songs, and a flexible ranking mechanism to find interesting songs. After we launched Songrium in August 2012, more than 7,000 users have used our service in which over 94,000 songs and 590,000 derivative works have automatically been registered. We hope Songrium will not only encourage creators to create more derivative works, but also attract consumers to participate in the collaboration as creators.

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