WikiSim: Simulating Knowledge Curation in Structured Wikis

From WikiSym 2008

WikiSim: Simulating Knowledge Curation in Structured Wikis

Authors: Luna De Ferrari, Stuart Aitken, Jano van Hemert, Igor Goryanin

This work aims at modelling how high quality knowledge can emerge from the work of independent curators. We model a wiki as a set of true and false values, added and edited by random users. This simple approach mimics the knowledge elements in structured semantic wikis, such as OntoWiki. Structured semantic wikis are particularly useful for transforming existing databases into collaborative wiki-style repositories.

We then analysed which factors affect the build up of correct knowledge in the wiki, for example, how robust it is to increasing user mistakes. Using power-law distributions for user activity already allows the model to reach distributions of edits and user activity similar to Wikipedia (not shown in the poster, but available as workshop article at WikiSym 2008).

In the future, we would like to use the model to compare centralised and wiki-style curation efforts and to integrate machine learning suggestions into the human curation effort.