What Did They Do? Deriving High-Level Edit Histories in Wikis

Track: Wiki Track
Authors: Peter Kin-Fong Fong and Robert P. Biuk-Aghai

Abstract
Wikis have become a popular online collaboration platform. Their open nature can, and indeed does, lead to a large number of editors of their articles, who create a large number of revisions. These editors make various types of edits on an article, from minor ones such as spelling correction and text formatting, to major revisions such as new content introduction, whole article re-structuring, etc. Given the enormous number of revisions, it is difficult to identify the type of contributions made in these revisions through human observation alone. Moreover, different types of edits imply different edit significance. A revision that introduces new content is arguably more significant than a
revision making a few spelling corrections. By taking edit types into account, better measurements of edit significance can be produced. This paper proposes a method for categorizing and presenting edits in an intuitive way and with a flexible measure of significance of each individual editor’s contributions.

• Code at Sourceforge
• Paper (on author's site)
• Presentation (on SlideShare)

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