Call for Papers: Wikipedia Research Track at WikiSym + OpenSym 2013

WikiSym, the 9th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
OpenSym, the 2013 International Symposium on Open Collaboration

August 5-7, 2013 | Hong Kong, China

ACM In-cooperation with SIGWEB and SIGSOFT. Archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Research paper submission deadline: April 2, 2013 (March 17, 2013).

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. Read more about the conference at wikisym.org/wsos2013.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WIKIPEDIA RESEARCH TRACK

Topics of interest to the Wikipedia research track include, but are not limited to:

  • What do particular articles or groups or articles tell us about the norms, governance and architecture of Wikipedia and its impact on media, politics and the social sphere? How is information on Wikipedia being shaped by the materiality of Wikipedia infrastructure?
  • What is the impact of all/some of Wikipedia’s 211 language editions having on achieving the project’s goal to represent the “sum of all human knowledge”? Do smaller language editions follow the same development path as larger language editions? Can different representations in different languages tell us anything about cultural, national or regional differences?
  • What are the gendered dimensions of Wikipedia editing? How are issues around power, knowledge and representation drawn into focus by gender, geography and other gaps and imbalances in Wikipedia editing?
  • What skills/competencies/connections/world views are required to become an empowered member of the Wikimedia community? What does a Wikipedia literate person look like? How are those skills/competencies/connections/world views obtained and enacted?
  • Does Wikipedia enact an open source of authoritative knowledge that impacts learning in formal and informal settings? For instance, how do students employ Wikipedia as a covert/overt source in their papers or as a generative site for problem formulation? Or how is Wikipedia being used as a serendipitous experience of knowledge acquisition? What methods can be employed to understand these varied utilizations?
  • What is the effect of outreach initiatives involving the growing institutionalisation of Wikipedia activities? As galleries, libraries, archives and museums hire Wikipedians-in-residence to digitize, showcase and/or represent their collections, is Wikipedia able to fill some its key knowledge gaps? Or are there unintended effects of this institutionalization of knowledge?
  • What are the methodological challenges to studying Wikipedia? How are researchers engaging with innovative methodologies to solve some of these problems? How are other researchers using traditional or well-established methods to study Wikipedia?
  • How are wiki projects other than Wikipedia evolving? What are the benefits to studying other wiki projects and can comparisons and generalisations be made from our observations of these systems?
  • How does information contained in Wikipedia shape our understanding of broader social, economic, and political practices and processes? What theoretical frameworks in social, economic, legal and other relevant theoretical traditions can be applied to enrich the academic discourse on Wikipedia?

SUBMISSION INFORMATION AND INSTRUCTIONS

The following types of submissions are invited:

  • Long research papers (5 to 10 pages)
  • Short research papers (1 to 4 pages)
  • Research posters (1 to 2 pages)
  • Research presentations (1 to 10 pages)

Research papers present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new theoretical or empirical work. Research papers will be reviewed by the research track program committee to meet rigorous academic standards of publication. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, conceptual quality, innovation and clarity of presentation. They must be written in English. At least one author of accepted papers is required to attend the conference in order to present the paper.

Research presentations present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new theoretical or empirical work. This is a new format is specifically aimed at the requirements of social science researchers enabling those researchers to use WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 (WS+OS) as a pre-publication venue before journal publication. Only the abstracts of these papers will be published as part of the proceedings thus leaving open the opportunity for journal publication at a later date. Research presentations will be reviewed by the research track program committee to meet rigorous academic standards just like research papers.

Research posters enable researchers to present late-breaking research results, significant research work in progress, or research work that is best communicated in conversation. WS+OS’s lively poster sessions let conference attendees exchange ideas one-on-one with authors, and let authors discuss their work in detail with those attendees most deeply interested in the topic. Successful applicants will display their posters, up to 1x2m in size, at a special session during the event.

Submissions for experience reports (long and short), tutorials, workshops, panels, non-research posters, and demos are also sought but are handled through the community track, please see the community track call for submissions. Submissions to WS+OS’s Doctoral Symposium are also sought but are handled separately, please see the doctoral symposium call for submissions.

Submissions should follow the standard ACM SIG proceedings format. For advice and templates, please see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates. All papers must conform at time of submission to the formatting instructions and must not exceed the page limits, including all text, references, appendices and figures. All submissions must in PDF format.

All papers and posters should be submitted electronically through EasyChair using the following URL: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=wikisym2013.

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WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 General Call for Submissions (Papers)

WikiSym, the 9th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
OpenSym, the 2013 International Symposium on Open Collaboration

August 5-7, 2013 | Hong Kong, China

ACM In-cooperation with SIGWEB and SIGSOFT.

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.

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WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 Explained

Conference Concept

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 is the conference for researchers and practitioners of open collaboration processes and technology, as found in wikis, Wikipedia, open source, citizen engineering, open access, open data, etc. (See definition at http://wp.me/pezfy-fB). WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 brings together these different strands of open collaboration research and practice in one unifying event, scheduled for Aug 5-7, 2013, in Hong Kong, China.

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Definition of Open Collaboration

Many years after we started to use the term open collaboration and after some discussion between the WikiSym steering committee members, here is our definition of “open collaboration”. It provides the umbrella motivation for WikiSym + OpenSym.

Open collaboration is collaboration that is egalitarian (everyone can join, no principled or artificial barriers to participation exist), meritocratic (decisions and status are merit-based rather than imposed) and self-organizing (processes adapt to people rather than people adapt to pre-defined processes).

Prime places to find open collaboration are on wikis, on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects, in open source, in open data and open government initiatives, open innovation, citizen engineering, peer production, and so on.

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Announcing WikiSym + OpenSym 2013: Hong Kong, China, on Aug 5-7, 2013

We are happy to announce that WikiSym 2013 will take place in Hong Kong on Aug 5-7, 2013. WikiSym will co-locate with a new sister event, OpenSym 2013. (WikiSym will be followed by Wikimania 2013, also in Hong Kong.) Research paper submission deadlines for WikiSym + OpenSym will be in March 2013. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 will emphasize the open collaboration aspect of WikiSym both for researchers as well as practitioners. Open space will play an important role. More details to follow, stay tuned!

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WikiSym 2012 Testimonials

From Heather Ford‘s excellent blog on Ethnography (and other matters), comes this quote:

In the closing session last year, I remember saying “I have been to a lot of conferences lately and I don’t feel like I belong. But I feel like I belong here.” People come to WikiSym because it’s the place to be if you’re doing Wikipedia work. In the words of conference chair, Cliff Lampe said, “WikiSym is the place we come where we know we don’t have to explain ourselves. Where people just “get it”.

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Wikisym 2012 starts tomorrow, and it looks to be a great program. Later, I’ll thank all of the volunteers who have poured their hearts into this conference, but I want to take a moment to thank the great sponsors we have for this meeting as well.

Ars Electronica Center (http://www.aec.at/) has provided a very welcoming, engaging, and inspiring home for us this week. With the able help of Stefan Pewan and Laura Kepplinger, they have let us hang out on the shores of the Danube on the cusp of the Ars Electronica festival. Watching little kids put together radio controlled paper letter signs (hard to explain) has been fun.

The Wikimedia Foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.org/) has been a great supporter, allowing us to bring in some excellent keynote speakers and keep the cost of the conference low for attendees. This enables a group of great young researchers, who are asking the questions important for the future sustainability of open collaboration, to participate and discuss with one another their findings.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (http://nsf.gov) has provided generous support for many of the doctoral students who attended the Sunday Doctoral Consortium to travel to that meeting, and attend the conference. The DC was a fantastic day of young scholars sharing their work and receiving feedback from professors at different universities. Specifically, this funding was made available by the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate.

Finally, Google has provided generous support to enable us to provide some refreshments, and host the reception. This funding was initiated by their group who supports open source projects of all types, and they are moral supporters of the mission of Wikisym as well as financial supporters.

Thanks to these folks, we’ll be able to put on a fantastic program this year, and leave future Wikisyms in a good state. We appreciate this support, and it goes to show how many people it takes to make an event like this a success.

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Wikisym 2012 ready to go in one week!

I can’t believe it’s already on us, but Wikisym 2012 starts in Linz Austria next week. This year, we have an exciting program. On Tuesday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is speaking to our group as our opening keynote speaker. This is a great opportunity to engage in the project’s most vocal advocate and think about how our research can help the sustainability of open collaboration into the future.

We also have a diverse program of content. Like always, we’ll be doing Open Spaces, which allows people to host incredible discussions and have ad hoc meetings of the mind about topics that interest us all. Dozens of authors and reviewers, and our awesome Technical Chair Dan Cosley, have created a rich and exciting technical program.

http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/bin/view/Main/Schedule

I start my travel soon, so I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in beautiful Linz to discuss some exciting research and practice around open collaboration.

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Wikisym 2012 Sneak Peeks!

It’s hard to believe we’re just weeks away from Wikisym 2012. In the next few days, I wanted to highlight some content at the conference we’re very excited about. Today, I’m highlighting our closing keynote speaker, Brent Hecht.

Brent is a PhD candidate at Northwestern, and will be starting at the University of Minnesota this coming year. He’s giving a very thoughtful talk on the ways to mine and encourage diversity in user generated content communities. From his abstract:

“It is well known – especially to WikiSym attendees – that Wikipedia articles and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) play a significant role in the everyday lives of average Web users. Outside the public eye, however, UGC has become equally indispensable as a source of world knowledge for vital systems and algorithms in numerous areas of computer science. In this talk, I will demonstrate that UGC reflects the cultural diversity of its contributors to a previously unidentified extent and that this diversity has important implications for millions of Web users and many existing UGC-based technologies. Focusing on Wikipedia, I will show how UGC diversity can be extracted and measured using diversity mining algorithms and techniques from geographic information science. Finally, through two novel applications – Omnipedia and Atlasify – I will highlight the exciting potential for a new class of technologies enabled by the ability to harvest diverse perspectives from UGC.”

Brent’s an engaging speaker, who has wowed crowds at CHI. We’re looking forward to his participation in the coming conference.

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WikiSym 2012 Registration Glitch

If you registered during July 11 and July 27 and you also received an email that your registration was cancelled, you ran into a WikiSym / Google Checkout glitch that we just discovered. The cancellation is correct and you will have to register again using WikiSym 2012 Registration.

We believe that only a small number of registrations are affected. Still, it is annoying, and we apologize for any inconveniences this may cause!

Early registration has been extended until August 6.

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