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Defining, understanding, and supporting open collaboration: Lessons from the literature. American Behavioral Scientist
, 2013
"... The past twenty years have seen broad popularization of a relatively novel kind of human enterprise: open collaboration. Open collaboration projects are distributed, collaborative efforts made possible because of changes in information and communication technology that facilitate cooperative activit ..."
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The past twenty years have seen broad popularization of a relatively novel kind of human enterprise: open collaboration. Open collaboration projects are distributed, collaborative efforts made possible because of changes in information and communication technology that facilitate cooperative activities. The groundswell of open collaboration could be felt in the open source movement of the 90s but became unmistakable with the growth of projects like Wikipedia and, in particular, the maturation of research to help explain how and why such systems work, who participates, and when they might fail. By now thousands of scholars have written about open collaboration systems, many hundreds of thousands of people have participated in them, and millions of people use products of open collaboration every day. This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist assembles interdisciplinary scholarship that examines different aspects of open collaboration and the diverse systems that support it. The goal of this short introductory piece is to define open collaboration and contextualize a set of articles that span multiple disciplines and methods in a common vocabulary and history. We provide a definition of open collaboration and situate the phenomenon within an interrelated set of scholarly and ideological movements. We then examine the properties of open collaboration systems that have given rise to research and review major areas of scholarship, including the works in this issue, and close with a
In Search of the Ur-Wikipedia: Universality, Similarity, and Translation in the Wikipedia Inter-language Link Network
"... Wikipedia has become one of the primary encyclopaedic in-formation repositories on the World Wide Web. It started in 2001 with a single edition in the English language and has since expanded to more than 20 million articles in 283 lan-guages. Criss-crossing between the Wikipedias is an inter-languag ..."
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Wikipedia has become one of the primary encyclopaedic in-formation repositories on the World Wide Web. It started in 2001 with a single edition in the English language and has since expanded to more than 20 million articles in 283 lan-guages. Criss-crossing between the Wikipedias is an inter-language link network, connecting the articles of one edition of Wikipedia to another. We describe characteristics of ar-ticles covered by nearly all Wikipedias and those covered by only a single language edition, we use the network to under-stand how we can judge the similarity between Wikipedias based on concept coverage, and we investigate the flow of translation between a selection of the larger Wikipedias. Our findings indicate that the relationships between Wiki-pedia editions follow Tobler’s first law of geography: sim-ilarity decreases with increasing distance. The number of articles in a Wikipedia edition is found to be the strongest predictor of similarity, while language similarity also appears to have an influence. The English Wikipedia edition is by far the primary source of translations. We discuss the im-pact of these results for Wikipedia as well as user-generated content communities in general.
Leveraging Advances in Natural Language Processing to Better Understand Tobler’s First Law of Geography
"... Tobler’s First Law of Geography (TFL) is one of the key reasons why “spatial is special”. The law, which states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”, is central to the management, presentation, and analysis of geographic information. H ..."
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Tobler’s First Law of Geography (TFL) is one of the key reasons why “spatial is special”. The law, which states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”, is central to the management, presentation, and analysis of geographic information. However, despite the importance of TFL, we have a limited general understanding of its domain-neutral properties. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in the natural language processing domain of semantic relatedness estimation to, for the first time, robustly evaluate the extent to which relatedness between spatial entities decreases over distance in a domain-neutral fashion. Our results reveal that, in general, TFL can indeed be considered a globally recognized domain-neutral property of geographic information but that there is a distance beyond which being nearer, on average, no longer means being more related.
Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles
"... Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit ..."
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Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
Examining Wikipedia across Linguistic and Temporal Borders
"... ABSTRACT The Web has grown to be an integral part of modern society offering novel ways for humans to communicate, interact, and share information. New collaborative platforms are forming which are providing individuals with new communities and knowledge bases and, at the same time, offering insigh ..."
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ABSTRACT The Web has grown to be an integral part of modern society offering novel ways for humans to communicate, interact, and share information. New collaborative platforms are forming which are providing individuals with new communities and knowledge bases and, at the same time, offering insights into human activity for researchers, policy-makers and engineers. On a global scale, the role of cultural and language barriers when studying such phenomena becomes particularly relevant and presents significant challenges: due to insufficient information, it is often hard to establish the cultural or language groups in which individuals belong, while there are technical difficulties in establishing the relevance and in analysing resources in different languages. This paper presents a framework to the end of addressing those issues by leveraging data on the use of Wikipedia. Resources available in different languages are explicitly correlated in Wikipedia along with time-stamped logs of access to its articles. This paper provides a framework to enable temporal page views in Wikipedia to be associated with specific geographic profiles. This framework is then used to examine the exchange of information between the English speaking and Chinese speaking localities and reports initial findings on the role of language and culture in diffusion in this context.
Analyzing Multi-Dimensional Networks within MediaWikis
"... 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 editors of its articles such as hyperlinks between articles, discussions among editors, ..."
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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 editors of its articles such as hyperlinks between articles, discussions among editors, 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.
On the analysis of Wikipedia activity through time
"... Abstract—Wikipedia articles see bursts of update activity whenever a topic is of more interest to the community or has somehow become controversial. Analyzing when and what changes are made can, thus, give us an idea of how the community feels about particular subjects. In this paper we present PopC ..."
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Abstract—Wikipedia articles see bursts of update activity whenever a topic is of more interest to the community or has somehow become controversial. Analyzing when and what changes are made can, thus, give us an idea of how the community feels about particular subjects. In this paper we present PopCulture, a system that provides a visualization of Wikipedia’s edits that allows us to reflect on how different subjects are perceived by people over time and, by comparing articles from different language wikipedias, find regional and cultural differences of interest and perception. A set of user studies shows that, indeed, users are able to use PopCulture effectively and efficiently to find such trends and differences. Keywords-Visualization,Wikipedia, Cultural Differences I.
THIS DOCUMENT IS AN UNPUBLISHED DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT DISTRIBUTE OR CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION. Peer Production: A Form of Collective Intelligence∗
"... Wikipedia has mobilized a collective of millions to produce an enormous, high quality, encyclopedia without traditional forms of hierarchical organization or financial incentives. More than any other twenty-first century collaborative endeavor, Wikipedia has attracted the attention of scholars in th ..."
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Wikipedia has mobilized a collective of millions to produce an enormous, high quality, encyclopedia without traditional forms of hierarchical organization or financial incentives. More than any other twenty-first century collaborative endeavor, Wikipedia has attracted the attention of scholars in the social sciences and law both as an example of what collective intelligence makes possible and
I have also been fortunate enough to have benefited from valuable conversations with:
, 2013
"... Wikipedia articles, tweets, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) play an essential role in the experience of the average Web user. Outside the public eye, UGC has become equally indispensable as a source of world knowledge for systems and algorithms that help us make sense of big data. In ..."
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Wikipedia articles, tweets, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) play an essential role in the experience of the average Web user. Outside the public eye, UGC has become equally indispensable as a source of world knowledge for systems and algorithms that help us make sense of big data. In this thesis, we demonstrate that UGC reflects the cultural diversity of its contributors to a previously unidentified extent, and that this diversity has important implications for Web users and existing UGC-based technologies. Focusing on Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter, we show how UGC diversity can be extracted and measured using techniques from artificial intelligence and geographic information science. Finally, through two novel applications – Omnipedia and Atlasify – we highlight the exciting potential for a new class of technologies enabled by the ability to harvest diverse perspectives from UGC. 4ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I use the term “we ” instead of “I ” in this thesis not only because this is the standard in my field but also because without the support and collaboration of dozens of my colleagues, the research below would not have been possible. The people who have contributed to the research in this thesis and my research that motivated it include:
A Platform for Visually Exploring the Development of Wikipedia Articles
"... When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thou ..."
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When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, espe-cially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limi-tations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.
