The Signpost

Recent research

WikiSym 2013 retrospective

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

WikiSym 2013

WikiSym+OpenSym 2013 group photo (showing around half of the participants at Jumbo Kingdom)

Ninety-eight registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility. The event preceded the annual global Wikimania conference of the Wikimedia movement in the same city.

WikiSym was started in 2005 as the "International Symposium on Wikis", and its scope has since been broadened to include the study of other forms of "open collaboration" (such as free software development, or open data), reflected in the adoption of the separate "OpenSym" label. The proceedings, published online at the start of the conference, contain 22 full papers (out of 43 submissions), in addition to short papers, posters, abstracts for research-in-progress presentations, etc. The coverage below reflects the scope of this research report, and complements the pre-conference reviews of some papers in the previous issue.

Episode 96 of the "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast contains some coverage of WikiSym 2013 (from around 10:30-20:00), and some images and media from the event can be found on Wikimedia Commons.

Next year's WikiSym+OpenSym conference will be held in Berlin, on August 27-29, 2014, and call for papers is already out. Conference chair Dirk Riehle announced that the proceedings will continue to be published with ACM, now under its new open access policy.

Full papers

Keynote on applicable Wikipedia research

From Taraborelli's keynote: Topic areas of research publications about Wikipedia, 2001-2012/13 (based on Google Scholar search results, data source)

In reflection of the conference's broadened scope, only one of the three keynotes focused on research about wikis and open collaboration: In his presentation "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research,"[9] Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation (and co-editor of this research report) made the case for Wikipedia research that has the potential to have a positive impact on Wikipedia itself, citing e.g. the opportunities opened by the ongoing user interface development work at the Foundation, and pointing to the ample data resources it offers researchers. (The title alluded to the metaphor of Wikipedia as the Mount Everest of online collaboration researchers, as put forth in the title of a session at last year's CSCW conference: "Scaling our Everest".)

Surveying the existing body of research, he identified the study of Wikipedia's gender gap and of its breaking news collaborations as relatively new research areas, and "Wikipedia and higher education" as a fast-growing topic, while papers which use Wikipedia as a corpus (from the field of Natural language processing, in particular) continue to see steady growth. Areas which have seen successful existing examples of actionable research include:

Other presentations

Two research-in-progress presentations by Oxford-based Taiwanese researcher Han-Teng Liao compared the Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, providing interesting insights from one of the few languages where Wikipedia has serious competition as a user-generated encyclopedia:

Collective memories in Wikipedia

Researchers Michela Ferron and Paolo Massa expand on their previous work[14] analyzing collective memories on Wikipedia to find statistical evidence that commemorative editing of traumatic events differentiates these articles from other article and talk page contribution patterns.[15] For major recent events such as the 9/11 attacks as well as more historical events such as the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, there is a significant increase in editing activity on these articles and talk pages (in the English Wikipedia) on the anniversaries of these events compared to the normal day-to-day editing patterns. Qualitative examination of the content of talk page discussions on these dates likewise reveals editors' attempts to make sense of and commemorate traumatic cultural events on their anniversaries. The implications of this research are important because Wikipedia is a commons on which different perspectives about traumatic and historic events are interpreted, co-constructed, and revisited by users. The data used in this analysis was also released by the authors and is available here.

Briefly


References

  1. ^ Getting to the Source: Where does Wikipedia Get Its Information From?[1]
  2. ^ The role of conflict in determining consensus on quality in Wikipedia articles [2]
  3. ^ Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker : When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes? [3]
  4. ^ Jonathan T. Morgan, Michael Gilbert, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry: Project talk: Coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects [4]
  5. ^ Michael Gilbert, Jonathan T. Morgan, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry: Managing Complexity: Strategies for group awareness and coordinated action in Wikipedia PDF
  6. ^ Hannes Dohrn, Dirk Riehle: Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings [5]
  7. ^ Revision graph extraction in Wikipedia based on supergram decomposition http://opensym.org/wsos2013/proceedings/p0204-wu.pdf
  8. ^ Jeffrey Segall, Rachel Greenstadt: The Illiterate Editor: Metadata-driven Revert Detection in Wikipedia [6]
  9. ^ Dario Taraborelli: "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research", WikiSym/OpenSym 2013 keynote, abstract, slides
  10. ^ Han-Teng Liao: "How do Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia filter contribution? A case study of network gatekeeping" (abstract)PDF
  11. ^ Han-Teng Liao: How does localization influence online visibility of user-generated encyclopedias? A study on Chinese-language Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) abstract
  12. ^ Han-Teng Liao:“Wikipedias” (or its copycat) dominate “Chinese” search engine result pages (SERPs)
  13. ^ Beat Estermann: Swiss Heritage Institutions in the Internet Era. Results of a pilot survey on open data and crowdsourcing PDF
  14. ^ "Google Scholar profile: Michela Ferron". Google. Retrieved August 27, 2013.
  15. ^ Ferron, Michela; Massa, Paolo (2013). "Beyond the encyclopedia: Collective memories in Wikipedia". Memory Studies.
  16. ^ [7]
  17. ^ Tobias Futterer, Peter A. Gloor, Tushar Malhotra, Harrison Mfula, Karsten Packmohr, Stefan Schultheiss: "WikiPulse - A News-Portal Based on Wikipedia" http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1166
  18. ^ Stuart Geiger: About a bot: Materiality, multiplicity, and memory in the study of software agents Ethnography Matters, August 13, 2013
  19. ^ Berit Schreck, Mirko Kämpf, Jan W. Kantelhardt, Holger Motzkau: Comparing the usage of global and local Wikipedias with focus on Swedish Wikipedia. http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1776



















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Recent_research