Jianmin Wu, Mizuho Iwaihara

As one of the popular social media that many people turn to in recent years, collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia provides information in a more “Neutral Point of View” way than others. Towards this core principle, plenty of efforts have been put into collaborative contribution and editing. The trajectories of how such collaboration appears by revisions are valuable for group dynamics and social media research, which suggest that we should extract the underlying derivation relationships among revisions from chronologically-sorted revision history in a precise way. In this paper, we propose a revision graph extraction method based on supergram decomposition in the document collection of near-duplicates. We show that this method can effectively perform the task than existing methods.

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

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.

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.

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.

August 5-7, 2013 | Hong Kong, China

Registration >> Program Overview | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Industry Tutorials

Conference Program

The conference program is led by three renowned keynote speakers: Phil Bourne, founding editor of PLOS, will talk about the era of open, Pockey Lam, of the Digital Freedom Foundation, will talk about open education, and Dario Taraborelli, of the Wikimedia Foundation, will talk about current and future Wikipedia research.

The keynotes are enhanced by a strong research track on the different aspects of open collaboration, namely wikis, Wikipedia, open source, and open access.

Open space, community events and socializing during coffee breaks and dedicated social events like the welcome reception and the conference dinner complement and enhance the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 experience. An industry tutorial track ensures a healthy mixture of participants.

Come join us in Hong Kong, one of the most vibrant cities on this planet, and learn how and why open collaboration is shaping the future!

Learn more at the conference website.

About the Conference

The 2013 Joint International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013) is the premier conference on open collaboration research, including wikis and social media, Wikipedia, free, libre, and open source software, open access, open data and open government research. WikiSym is in its 9th year and will be complemented by OpenSym, a new conference on open collaboration research and an adjunct to the successful WikiSym conference series.

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 is the first conference to bring together the different strands of open collaboration research, seeking to create synergies and inspire new research between computer scientists, social scientists, legal scholars, and everyone interested in understanding open collaboration and how it is changing the world.

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 will be held in Hong Kong, China, on August 5-7, 2013.

ACM In-cooperation with SIGWEB and SIGSOFT.

Sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, Cyberport, and TJEF.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.