OpenSym News

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

Kim Osman

Wikipedia is an important institution and part of the new media landscape having evolved from the collaborative efforts of millions of distributed users. This poster will present ongoing research that examines how the issues that have been highlighted by conflict within the community have shaped the evolution of Wikipedia from an open wiki experiment to a global knowledge producer. Bringing together the concepts of interpretive flexibility and generative friction with existing theories on the evolution of institutions, the research aims to present possible futures for Wikipedia as part of not only the larger Wikimedia movement, but of an open and accessible web.

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.

Jeffrey Segall, Rachel Greenstadt

As the community depends more heavily on Wikipedia as a source of reliable information, the ability to quickly detect and remove detrimental information becomes increasingly important. The longer incorrect or malicious information lingers in a source perceived as reputable, the more likely that information will be accepted as correct and the greater the loss to source reputation. We present The Illiterate Editor (IllEdit), a content-agnostic, metadata-driven classication approach to Wikipedia revert detection. Our primary contribution is in building a metadata-based feature set for detecting edit quality, which is then fed into a Support Vector Machine for edit classication. By analyzing edit histories, the IllEdit system builds a prole of user behavior, estimates expertise and spheres of knowledge, and determines whether or not a given edit is likely to be eventually reverted. The success of the system in revert detection (0.844 F-measure) as well as its disjoint feature set as compared to existing, content-analyzing vandalism detection systems, shows promise in the synergistic usage of IllEdit for increasing the reliability of community information.

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.

Jianmin Wu, Mizuho Iwaihara

As one of the popular social media that many people turn to in recent years, collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia provides information in a more “Neutral Point of View” way than others. Towards this core principle, plenty of efforts have been put into collaborative contribution and editing. The trajectories of how such collaboration appears by revisions are valuable for group dynamics and social media research, which suggest that we should extract the underlying derivation relationships among revisions from chronologically-sorted revision history in a precise way. In this paper, we propose a revision graph extraction method based on supergram decomposition in the document collection of near-duplicates. We show that this method can effectively perform the task than existing methods.

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.

Heather Ford, David R. Musicant, Shilad Sen, Nathaniel Miller

We ask what kinds of sources Wikipedians value most and compare Wikipedia’s stated policy on sources to what we observe in practice. We find that, contrary to Wikipedia policy, primary data sources developed by alternative publishers are both popular and persistent, and that Wikipedians make almost equal use of information produced by associations such as nonprofits and from scholarly publishers. Our findings suggest that Wikipedians must balance Wikipedia’s internal policy on sources against its goal of representing “the sum of human knowledge.”

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.

Morten Warncke-Wang, Dan Cosley and John Riedl

In this paper we address the problem of developing actionable quality models for Wikipedia, models whose features directly suggest strategies for improving the quality of a given article. We first survey the literature in order to understand the notion of article quality in the context of Wikipedia and existing approaches to automatically assessing article quality. We then develop classification models with varying combinations of more or less actionable features, and and that a model that only contains clearly actionable features delivers good results. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of how they can help improve the quality of articles across Wikipedia.

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

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.