Authors: Felix Halim, Wu Yongzheng, and Roland Yap (National University of Singapore) (Singapore)

Abstract: Wikipedia has been very successful as an open encyclopedia which is editable by anybody. However, the anonymous nature of Wikipedia means that readers may have less trust since there is no way of verifying the credibility of the authors or contributors. We propose to automatically transfer external information about the authors from outside Wikipedia to Wikipedia pages. These additional information is meant to enhance the credibility of the content. For example, it could be the education level, professional expertise or aliation of the author. We do this while maintaining anonymity. In this paper, we present the design and architecture of such system together with a prototype.

Authors: Takafumi Nakanishi, Koji Zettsu, Yutaka Kidawara(NICT)(Japan), and Yasushi Kiyoki(NICT/Keio University)(Japan)

Abstract: This paper presents a new Wiki called SAVVY Wiki that realizes context-oriented, collective and collaborative knowledge management environments that are able to reflect users’ intentions and recognitions. Users can collaboratively organize fragmentary knowledge with the help of the SAVVY Wiki. Fragmentary knowledge, in this case, implies existing Wiki content, multimedia content on the web, and so on. Users select and allocate fragmentary knowledge in different contexts onto the SAVVY Wiki. Owing to this operation, it is ensured that related pages belong to the same contexts. That is, users can find correlations among the pages in a Wiki. The SAVVY Wiki provides new collective knowledge created from fragmentary knowledge, depending on contexts, in accordance with the users’ collaborative operations. Various collaborative working environments have been developed for the sharing of collective knowledge. Most current Wikis have a collaborative editing mode to every page, as a platform to enable a collaborative working environment. In order to understand an arbitrary concept thoroughly, it is necessary to find correlations among the various threads of content, depending on the users’ purpose, task or interest. In a Wiki system, it is important to realize a collaborative editing environment with correlation among pages depending on the contexts. In this paper, we present a method to realize the SAVVY Wiki, and describe its developing prototype system.

Debatepedia Founder Brooks Lindsay will host a panel focusing on projects and individuals attempting to build what amounts to “the Wikipedia of debates” or “the Wikipedia of pros and cons”. The panel will bring together Debatepedia founder Brooks Lindsay, Debatewise founder David Crane, Opposing Views founder Russell Fine, and ProCon.org editor Kambiz Akhavan. We will discuss our successes and failures over the past three years, and the way forward for clarifying public debates via wiki and other technologies.

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Author: Urs Egli (Egli Partners Attorneys-at-Law, Zurich, Switzerland) and Peter Sommerlad (HSR Hochschule für Technik, Rapperswil, Switzerland)

Abstract: This practitioner report gives an overview the experiences of a law firm with adopting Wiki Webs for knowledge management and collaboration over the last two years. Wikis created a business advantage for the lawyers through better re-use of their know-how within the firm. In addition, external Wikis for clients created new revenue opportunities and higher client satisfaction. The law firm uses a very simple Wiki implementation that makes it very easy to establish new Wiki instances. For client collaboration the Wiki was secured and extended with a simple user management system.

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You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

Authors: Johannes Hoffart and Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych

Abstract: We present an architecture for integrating a set of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques with a wiki platform. This entails support for adding, organizing, and finding content in the wiki. We perform a comprehensive analysis of how NLP techniques can support the user interaction with the wiki, using an intelligent interface to provide suggestions. The architecture is designed to be deployed with any existing wiki platform, especially those used in corporate environments. We implemented a prototype integrating the NLP techniques keyphrase extraction and text segmentation, as well as an improved search engine. The prototype is integrated with two widely used wiki platforms: MediaWiki and TWiki.

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You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

Authors: Joachim Kimmerle, Johannes Moskaliuk, and Ulrike Cress (University of Tuebingen) (Germany)

Abstract: Learning “the wiki way”, learning through wikis is a form of self-regulated learning that is independent of formal learning settings and takes place in a community of knowledge. Such a community may work jointly on a digital artifact to create new, innovative and emergent knowledge. We regard wikis as a prototype of tools for community-based learning, and point out five relevant features. We will present the co-evolution model, as introduced by Cress and Kimmerle, that may be understood as a framework to describe learning in the wiki way. This model describes collaborative knowledge building as a co-evolution between cognitive and social systems. To investigate learning the wiki way, we have to consider both individual processes and processes within the wiki, which represent the processes that are going on within a community. This paper presents three empirical studies that investigate learning the wiki way in a laboratory setting. We take a look at participants’ contributions to a wiki indicating processes within the wiki community, and measure the extent of individual learning at the end of the experiment. Our conclusion is that the model of co-evolution has a strong impact on understanding learning the wiki way, may be helpful to designers of learning environments, and serve as framework for further research.

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You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

The registration for WikiSym 2009 is open! Please register first on the wiki and then for the (physical) event, if you want to attend in person.

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The event registration is handled by the OOPSLA registration system. If you are only interested in WikiSym, you can shorten the event registration: Once on page 4 in the process, jump forward to page 14 to checkout.

We have previously published the participation fee schedule. Please note that early (reduced fee) registration ends September 17!

Thanks, and see you in Orlando!

WikiSym 2009, Closing Keynote, Tuesday October 27, 2009

Speaker: Brion Vibber (CTO, Wikimedia Foundation)

Abstract: Collaborative communities such as those building wikis and open source software often discover that their human interactions have just as many scaling problems as their web infrastructure. As the number of people involved in a project grows, key decision-makers often become bottlenecks, and community structure needs to change or a project can become stalled despite the best intentions of all participants. I’ll describe some of the community scaling challenges in both Wikipedia’s editor community and the development of its underlying MediaWiki software and how we’ve overcome — or are still working to overcome — decision-making bottlenecks to “maximize community throughput”.

Speaker bio: Currently CTO and Senior Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, Brion Vibber has spent his career since 2002 growing up with Wikipedia’s community and software development. He lives in San Francisco in his native California, but still misses the Florida sunsets from his time at Wikimedia’s original offices in St Petersburg.

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You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009, Opening Keynote, Sunday October 25, 2009

Speakers: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research

Abstract: Visualization is often viewed as a way to unlock the secrets of numeric data. But what about political speeches, novels, and blogs? These texts hold at least as many surprises. On the Many Eyes site, a place for collective visualization, we have seen an increasing appetite for analyzing documents. We present a series of techniques for visualizing and analyzing unstructured text. We also discuss how a technique developed for visualizing the authoring patterns of Wikipedia articles has recently revealed the collective lives of a much broader class of documents.

Speaker bios: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Both Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

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You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 is shaping up nicely; we’ll soon be providing a first glimpse at the program. For now, here are the confirmed speakers, more to follow:

• Fernanda Viegas, IBM, and Martin Wattenberg, IBM, on Many Eyes, Visualization, and Wikipedia
• Brion Vibber, CTO, Wikimedia Foundation, on Community Performance Optimization
• Barbara Liskov, MIT, presenting a lecture repeating her Turing Award acceptance speech (via OOPSLA)
• Tom Malone, MIT Sloan and Center for Collective Intelligence, on the Future of Work (via Onward!)

We are very excited to have these speakers present at WikiSym 2009!