WikipediaResearch:Home

From WikiSym 2008

Workshop on Interdisciplinary Research on Wikipedia and Wiki Communities.

DEADLINE for SUBMISSIONS: August 12th

Nowadays, there exist a widespread consensus on the importance of interdisciplinary research on virtual communities. A growing number of projects continues to build upon collective intelligence of Internet users, looking for more dynamic, open and creative approaches suitable for their content creation and knowledge sharing purposes. Many of those projects are sustained by wiki environments, as wikis offer a convenient platform to take benefit of these new trends straightforwardly. Wikipedia can be seen as the epitome of this emerging networking philosophy, at present time, attracting the attention of a growing number of researchers in the past years. This scenario rises some interesting challenges from a research perspective: Which are the most adequate methodologies to undertake the analysis of these open communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) driving the evolution of these communities and determining their eventual success? Is it possible to find effective multidisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these highly dynamic creative environments? This workshops intends to provide a forum to present, debate and explore these questions, attracting interested researchers and practitioners willing to participate in such a “brainstorming research meeting”.

Overall description and main goals

The main goal of this workshop is to provide an adequate forum for wiki researchers worldwide to:

• present their own approaches for studying wiki based open communities from multiple perspectives (from e-learning to sociology, content analysis, quantitative analysis and data mining, social networking...),

• explain what are the main problems they face when they try to integrate different research approaches into a unique, coherent line of research,

• propose possible solutions in the form of tools, methodologies, research strategies and ways of collaboration that can be adopted to enforce these research works and to boost them towards successful results, and

• exchange their research ideas with other colleagues, who can provide novel points of view that could complement existing research initiatives in these areas.

In this context, the workshop organization will be threefold:

1. Present a complete perspective of the current state-of-the-art of Wikipedia and wiki-based open communities from different points of view. This will be achieved by presentations of position papers explaining existing tools and research methods successfully applied to the analysis of wiki environments.
2. Promote the creation of small working groups, to put in common distinct research strategies in these areas, and explore valuable interactions, ways of feedback and methods for merging distinct methodologies in a common line of research.
3. A final plenary session to debate the different solutions raised in the working groups, and summarizing a catalog of tools, methodologies and opportunities of collaboration that may be offered to wiki researchers to successfully undertake interdisciplinary analyses in this area.

Organizers committee:

• Dr. Joseph Reagle (NYU) USA

• Felipe Ortega (URJC-GSyC/Libresoft) SPAIN

• Antonio J. Reinoso (UAX & URJC-GSyC/Libresoft) SPAIN

• Rut Jesus (CPNSS) DENMARK

Reviews coordinator:

• Dr. Gregorio Robles (URJC-GSyC/Libresoft) SPAIN

More information: http://libresoft.es/Activities/Research_activities/Workshop_WikiSym