alain_desilets

I am a researcher at the National Research Council of Canada.

I am interestd in the usability of wikis (see paper "Are Wikis Usable?" in the paper session of WikiSym 05), and also in tools for better supporting multilingual wiki sites.

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1. Alain's Notes on WikiSym and OOPSLA

Recurrent themes

Do not hardcode social intelligence into system

Instead, provide people with tools that allow them to exercise their social intelligence and amplify it.

Both WardCunninghmam 's and JimWales 's presentations discussed this in the context of preventing abuse on open wikis (on C2Wiki and WikiPedia respectively). In both cases, what worked was not some elaborate technological solution, but rather a bit of social engineering, amplified with very lightweight technological tools.

In both cases, there is some use of circles of confidence, whereby people who are close to the leaders of the forums are given lot of control (ex: ability to view web logs of C2Wiki, ability to edit the top page of WikiPedia, and in both cases, ability to ban certain users). Next, are people outside this inner circle, who are considered to be OK until proven otherwise. Those people have less privileges, but not much less than people outside the inner circle. They can still edit pages on the forum for example. Finally, there are people who sit outside of the circle of confidence, i.e. those whose behaviour has been deemed unacceptable and are forbidden from editing the site.

There are no hard rules for defining what consists inappropriate behaviour (alhtough there are some clear cases like repeated obvious racist postings), certainly none that a machine could exercise. But at the same time, since the inner circle needs to remain small (otherwise it's not an inner circle), you need tools that allow people in that circle to more efficiently identify cases of inappropriate behaviour. On both C2Wiki and WikiPedia, those tools are very simple and lightweight. The RecentChanges link seems like the basic tool here, but in the case of C2Wiki, Ward also showed some simple visualisation tools for the wiki log. Although very simple (what else would you expect from Ward), they allowed one to very easily identify patterns like robots hitting the site, or people getting into posting fights. In the case of WikiPedia, JimWales mentioned some text-based (similar to spam filters I believe) tools for identifying postings that might be inappropriate.

One thing that struck me was how small the inner circle was in both cases. I forget in the case of WikiPedia but for C2Wiki, it was around a dozen people or so.

So in conclusion:

• concentric circles of confidence with decreasing privileges
• small inner circle
• tools to allow this inner circle in monitoring abuse

Growing software as a garden

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