Measuring Wikipedia

Speakers

Luca de Alfaro and Felipe Ortega.

Abstract

This tutorial is an introduction to the best methodologies, tools and practices for Wikipedia research.

The tutorial will be led by Luca de Alfaro (Wiki Lab at UCSC, California, USA) and Felipe Ortega (Libresoft, URJC, Madrid, Spain). Both cumulate several years of practical experience exploring and processing Wikipedia data [1], [2], [3]. As well, their respective research groups have led the development of two cutting-edge software tools (WikiTrust and WikiXRay), for analyzing Wikipedia. WikiTrust implements an author reputation system, and a text trust system, for wikis. WikiXRay is a tool automating the quantitative analysis of any language version of Wikipedia (in general, any wiki based on MediaWiki).

After attending this session, attendees should be able to:

• Outline a general picture of the different research perspectives currently applied to Wikipedia.
• Easily find previous research works and information sources to contextualize their own work on Wikipedia.
• Store, navigate and process information retrieved from the Wikipedia data jungle.
• Discriminate the optimum set of available tools that fits their own Wikipedia research needs, as well as develop their own set of tools.
• Create and refine their research roadmap, to achieve concrete goals and results.
• Feel comfortable using and extending WikiTrust and WikiXRay.

Speakers bios

Luca de Alfaro received a PhD. in Computer Science from Standford University (1998). He is an associate professor of Computer Engineering at the UC Santa Cruz. He leads the UCSC Wiki Lab, responsible for the development of the WikiTrust tool. Likewise, he also leads the Dvlab (Design and Verification laboratory) at UCSC. His research interests cover a wide range of topics, including applications (reputation systems, collaborative information creation, e-commerce), system design (embedded software design, formal methods for system design), system verification (discrete, real-time, embedded, and probabilistic systems) and foundations (game theory, concurrency theory, automata theory). WikiTrust is a MediaWiki extension that implements an author reputation system, and a text trust system, for wikis. WikiTrust adds to a wiki a check text tab that enables any visitor to check the author, origin, and reliability of wiki text. Thus, visitors can easily spot spam, surreptitious changes, and information tampering. The Wiki Lab members have produce a number of research papers on WikiTrust, most notably [1] and [2]. WikiTrust was also recently highlighted, on August 2009, on Wired Magazine.

Felipe Ortega is Researcher and Project Manager at Libresoft (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), since November 2007. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2009). His main research line is the Wikipedia project and its community of authors/editors. His PhD. dissertation, (available online), is the first one to provide a side-by-side empirical analysis of the top 10 language editions of Wikipedia, from different points of view. He also works to develop novel methodologies to analyze open collaborative projects (like FLOSS development projects, Wikipedia and social networking platforms) involving a very high number of participants. Felipe is the main developer behind WikiXRay, an extensible tool supporting the automation of quantitative analyses on any language edition of Wikipedia. Packages with quantitative information from many Wikipedia language editions, extracted by WikiXRay and ready to be used for research purposes, are available on the new WikiResearch repository, hosted by Spanish RedIRIS. He is (part-time) Associate Professor at Alfonso X El Sabio University (UAX), on Computer Architecture and Cryptography and Network Security. Before joining Libresoft, he was full-time Associate Professor at UAX, coordinating the Networking Lab and teaching more than 8 different courses (most of them related to Networking and Security) in 4 different Master Programs.

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