The Joint International Symposium on Open Collaboration

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.

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

Jonathan T. Morgan, Michael Gilbert, David McDonald, Mark Zachry

WikiProjects have contributed to Wikipedia’s success in important ways, yet the range of work that WikiProjects perform and the way they coordinate that work remains largely unexplored. In this study, we perform a content analysis of 788 work-related discussions from the talk pag-es of 138 WikiProjects in order to understand the role Wik-iProjects play in collaborative work on Wikipedia. We find that the editors use WikiProjects to coordinate a wide varie-ty of activities beyond content production and that non-members play a larger role in WikiProjects than previously thought. Our research suggests that WikiProject collabora-tion is more open and less structured than that of many vir-tual teams and projects function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups.

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.

Hannes Dohrn, Dirk Riehle

The organic growth of wikis requires constant attention by contributors who are willing to patrol the wiki and improve its content structure. However, most wikis still only offer textual editing and even wikis which offer WYSIWYG editing do not assist the user in restructuring the wiki. Therefore, “gardening” a wiki is a tedious and error-prone task. One of the main obstacles to assisted restructuring of wikis is the underlying content model which prohibits automatic transformations of the content. Most wikis use either a purely textual representation of content or rely on the representational HTML format. To allow rigorous definitions of transformations we use and extend a Wiki Object Model. With the Wiki Object Model installed we present a catalog of transformations and refactorings that helps users to easily and consistently evolve the content and structure of a wiki. Furthermore we propose XSLT as language for transformation specification and provide working examples of selected transformations to demonstrate that the Wiki Object Model and the transformation framework are well designed. We believe that our contribution significantly simplifies wiki “gardening” by introducing the means of effortless restructuring of articles and groups of articles. It furthermore provides an easily extensible foundation for wiki content transformations.

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, Arber Ceni, Marc Smith

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 users of its pages such as hyperlinks between pages, discussions among users, 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.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.