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132
Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations
, 2004
"... The Internet has fostered an unconventional and powerful style of collaboration: "wiki" web sites, where every visitor has the power to become an editor. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of Wikipedia, a prominent, thriving wiki. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a n ..."
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Cited by 350 (9 self)
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The Internet has fostered an unconventional and powerful style of collaboration: "wiki" web sites, where every visitor has the power to become an editor. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of Wikipedia, a prominent, thriving wiki. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a new exploratory data analysis tool, the history flow visualization, which is effective in revealing patterns within the wiki context and which we believe will be useful in other collaborative situations as well. Second, we discuss several collaboration patterns highlighted by this visualization tool and corroborate them with statistical analysis. Third, we discuss the implications of these patterns for the design and governance of online collaborative social spaces. We focus on the relevance of authorship, the value of community surveillance in ameliorating antisocial behavior, and how authors with competing perspectives negotiate their differences.
Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia
- In Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '05
"... Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a pro ..."
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Cited by 232 (7 self)
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Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.
The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume
- Journal of Universal Computer Science
, 2006
"... Abstract: To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of ..."
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Cited by 75 (0 self)
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Abstract: To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly. This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.
Cooperation and quality in Wikipedia
- In Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis
, 2007
"... The rise of the Internet has enabled collaboration and co-operation on an unprecedentedly large scale. The online en-cyclopedia Wikipedia, which presently comprises 7.2 mil-lion articles created by 7.04 million distinct editors, provides a consummate example. We examined all 50 million edits made to ..."
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Cited by 54 (0 self)
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The rise of the Internet has enabled collaboration and co-operation on an unprecedentedly large scale. The online en-cyclopedia Wikipedia, which presently comprises 7.2 mil-lion articles created by 7.04 million distinct editors, provides a consummate example. We examined all 50 million edits made to the 1.5 million English-language Wikipedia articles and found that the high-quality articles are distinguished by a marked increase in number of edits, number of editors, and intensity of cooperative behavior, as compared to other arti-cles of similar visibility and age. This is significant because in other domains, fruitful cooperation has proven to be dif-ficult to sustain as the size of the collaboration increases. Furthermore, in spite of the vagaries of human behavior, we show thatWikipedia articles accrete edits according to a sim-ple stochastic mechanism in which edits beget edits. Topics of high interest or relevance are thus naturally brought to the forefront of quality.
Mining domain-specific thesauri from wikipedia: A case study
- IN: PROC. OF ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON WEB INTELLIGENCE
, 2006
"... Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, highmaintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia, a vast, open encyclopedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture (Agrovoc) we fi ..."
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Cited by 52 (7 self)
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Domain-specific thesauri are high-cost, highmaintenance, high-value knowledge structures. We show how the classic thesaurus structure of terms and links can be mined automatically from Wikipedia, a vast, open encyclopedia. In a comparison with a professional thesaurus for agriculture (Agrovoc) we find that Wikipedia contains a substantial proportion of its domain-specific concepts and semantic relations; furthermore it has impressive coverage of a collection of contemporary documents in the domain. Thesauri derived using these techniques are attractive because they capitalize on existing public efforts and tend to reflect contemporary language usage better than their costly, painstakingly-constructed manual counterparts.
Analyzing and visualizing the semantic coverage of Wikipedia and its authors.
- Complexity,
, 2007
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From Wikipedia to the classroom: Exploring online publication and learning
- International Conference of the Learning Sciences
, 2006
"... Abstract: Wikipedia represents an intriguing new publishing paradigm—can it be used to engage students in authentic collaborative writing activities? How can we design wiki publishing tools and curricula to support learning among student authors? We suggest that wiki publishing environments can crea ..."
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Cited by 48 (2 self)
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Abstract: Wikipedia represents an intriguing new publishing paradigm—can it be used to engage students in authentic collaborative writing activities? How can we design wiki publishing tools and curricula to support learning among student authors? We suggest that wiki publishing environments can create learning opportunities that address four dimensions of authenticity: personal, real world, disciplinary, and assessment. We have begun a series of design studies to investigate links between wiki publishing experiences and writing-to-learn. The results of an initial study in an undergraduate government course indicate that perceived audience plays an important role in helping students monitor the quality of writing; however, students ’ perception of audience on the Internet is not straightforward. This preliminary iteration resulted in several guidelines that are shaping efforts to design and implement new wiki publishing tools and curricula for students and teachers. Wikipedia: This Just Doesn’t Make Sense A perplexing phenomenon has emerged online. Thousands of individuals have come together in one online community with the goal of building an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. This community relies on the work of volunteers, does not solicit contributions from experts, employs no formal review process, and allows people to
2007): “On the Evolution of Wikipedia
- in Proceedings of the ICWSM
"... A recent phenomenon on the Web is the emergence and pro-liferation of new social media systems allowing social inter-action between people. One of the most popular of these systems is Wikipedia that allows users to create content in a collaborative way. Despite its current popularity, not much is kn ..."
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Cited by 46 (0 self)
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A recent phenomenon on the Web is the emergence and pro-liferation of new social media systems allowing social inter-action between people. One of the most popular of these systems is Wikipedia that allows users to create content in a collaborative way. Despite its current popularity, not much is known about how users interact with Wikipedia and how it has evolved over time. In this paper we aim to provide a first, extensive study of the user behavior on Wikipedia and its evolution. Compared to prior studies, our work differs in several ways. First, previ-ous studies on the analysis of the user workloads (for systems such as peer-to-peer systems [10] and Web servers [2]) have mainly focused on understanding the users who are accessing information. In contrast, Wikipedia’s provides us with the opportunity to understand how users create and maintain in-formation since it provides the complete evolution history of its content. Second, the main focus of prior studies is eval-uating the implication of the user workloads on the system performance, while our study is trying to understand the evo-lution of the data corpus and the user behavior themselves. Our main findings include that (1) the evolution and up-dates of Wikipedia is governed by a self-similar process, not by the Poisson process that has been observed for the general Web [4, 6] and (2) the exponential growth of Wikipedia is mainly driven by its rapidly increasing user base, indicating the importance of its open editorial policy for its current suc-cess. We also find that (3) the number of updates made to the Wikipedia articles exhibit a power-law distribution, but the distribution is less skewed than those obtained from other studies.
