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

Jonathan T. Morgan, Michael Gilbert, David McDonald, Mark Zachry

WikiProjects have contributed to Wikipedia’s success in important ways, yet the range of work that WikiProjects perform and the way they coordinate that work remains largely unexplored. In this study, we perform a content analysis of 788 work-related discussions from the talk pag-es of 138 WikiProjects in order to understand the role Wik-iProjects play in collaborative work on Wikipedia. We find that the editors use WikiProjects to coordinate a wide varie-ty of activities beyond content production and that non-members play a larger role in WikiProjects than previously thought. Our research suggests that WikiProject collabora-tion is more open and less structured than that of many vir-tual teams and projects function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups.

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.

Hannes Dohrn, Dirk Riehle

The organic growth of wikis requires constant attention by contributors who are willing to patrol the wiki and improve its content structure. However, most wikis still only offer textual editing and even wikis which offer WYSIWYG editing do not assist the user in restructuring the wiki. Therefore, “gardening” a wiki is a tedious and error-prone task. One of the main obstacles to assisted restructuring of wikis is the underlying content model which prohibits automatic transformations of the content. Most wikis use either a purely textual representation of content or rely on the representational HTML format. To allow rigorous definitions of transformations we use and extend a Wiki Object Model. With the Wiki Object Model installed we present a catalog of transformations and refactorings that helps users to easily and consistently evolve the content and structure of a wiki. Furthermore we propose XSLT as language for transformation specification and provide working examples of selected transformations to demonstrate that the Wiki Object Model and the transformation framework are well designed. We believe that our contribution significantly simplifies wiki “gardening” by introducing the means of effortless restructuring of articles and groups of articles. It furthermore provides an easily extensible foundation for wiki content transformations.

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.

Brian Keegan, Arber Ceni, Marc Smith

The MediaWiki platform supports popular socio-technical systems such as Wikipedia as well as thousands of other wikis. This software encodes and records a variety of relationships about the content, history, and users of its pages such as hyperlinks between pages, discussions among users, and editing histories. These relationships can be analyzed using standard techniques from social network analysis, however, extracting relational data from Wikipedia has traditionally required specialized knowledge of its API, information retrieval, network analysis, and data visualization that has inhibited scholarly analysis. We present a software library called the NodeXL MediaWiki Importer that extracts a variety of relationships from the MediaWiki API and integrates with the popular NodeXL network analysis and visualization software. This library allows users to query and extract a variety of multidimensional relationships from any MediaWiki installation with a publicly-accessible API. We present a case study examining the similarities and differences between different relationships for the Wikipedia articles about “Pope Francis” and “Social media.” We conclude by discussing the implications this library has for both theoretical and methodological research as well as community management and outline future work to expand the capabilities of the library.

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

WikiSym + OpenSym would like to provide a full-fledged Open Access option for authors who submit research papers for inclusion in the conference proceedings. After reviewing our situation, we have identified the following requirements:

1. Reputable publisher (must). Obviously a must.
2. Established publisher (nice). The more established, the better, as long as the open access option is proper.
3. Non-profit publisher (nice). Many of the problems in publishing, including overcharging for open access publishing, stems from the for-profit motives the publisher. Thus, we prefer a stable non-profit publisher.
4. Known in computer science (nice). With a strong background in computer science, we prefer a publisher who has a proper reputation in computer science. This requirement may become less important over time.
5. Open access option (must). The publisher must allow for a proper open access option. The cheaper the better as long as the publisher is solid and has a long-term perspective.
6. Reputable license choice (must). The available open access licenses should be widely acknowledged and should include the CC-BY and CC-BY-SA families. A publication permission (no copyright transfer) is also acceptable.
7. No copyright transfer (nice). For those authors, who reject open access (or can’t pay the fees) the publisher should only request a publication permission rather than require a copyright transfer.
8. Allows for self-publication (must). With open access being an option, rather than a requirement, it is important that the publisher allows for self-publication (on the conference website and the authors’ own websites).
9. Reasonable and minimal service choice (nice). The publisher should allow for the submission of whole proceedings only and not require the purchase of additional editorial services (and impose consequent cost).

Requirements 1, 5, 6, and 8 are musts, requirements 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 are desirable but not required.

At present, the ACM Digital Library, our current publisher, does not offer 5 and 6, which are musts. They have made a recent announcement that they will provide these options, but details have not yet been provided.

Feedback is welcome!

We would like to clarify the reasons for publishing this year’s proceedings through

1. the ACM Digital Library and
2. the conference website.

In both cases, papers are not available under a Creative Commons (or the like) license, though they are freely available on the conference website (no paywall or other hurdles, see http://wikisym.org/archives/). Given that the conference itself is about everything open, including open access, this may strike some as odd.

First things first: As researchers and practitioners of open collaboration, we would like Open Access to be an option to everyone who wants to publish through WikiSym or OpenSym.

Our reasons for sticking with the ACM as the publisher in 2013 are the following:

Continue reading Why We Publish Through the ACM Digital Library in 2013 →

WikiSym, the 9th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
OpenSym, the 2013 International Symposium on Open Collaboration

August 5-7, 2013 | Hong Kong, China

ACM In-cooperation with SIGWEB and SIGSOFT. Archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Community track submission deadlines:

• Early deadline: March 17, 2013
• Regular deadline: May 17, 2013

The 2013 Joint International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013) is the premier conference on open collaboration research, including wikis and social media, Wikipedia, free, libre, and open source software, open access, open data and open government research. WikiSym is in its 9th year and will be complemented by OpenSym, a new conference on open collaboration research and an adjunct to the successful WikiSym conference series. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 is the first conference to bring together the different strands of open collaboration research, seeking to create synergies and inspire new research between computer scientists, social scientists, legal scholars, and everyone interested in understanding open collaboration and how it is changing the world. Read more about the conference at opensym.org/wsos2013.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: COMMUNITY TRACK

The following types of papers can be submitted to the community track:

• Experience report long and short: A regular presentation slot (30min) will be provided
• Workshop proposals: A workshop slot (half-day or full-day) is provided at the conference
• Panel proposals: A session (90min) discussion slot for the panel will be provided
• Demo proposals: Space and time is provided during the demo session (90min)
• Tutorial proposals: A tutorial slot (90min) is provided at the conference

Submissions are reviewed by the community track committee for their interest to the WikiSym + OpenSym community in general. For questions about community track submissions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Continue reading Call for Submissions: Community Track at WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 →