United States
From WikiPapers
| Countries | |
|---|---|
|
United States | |
This page compiles all the information regarding United States.
Events
This is a list of events celebrated in this country.| Name | Type | DateThis property is a special property in this wiki. | Website |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikimania 2012 | conference | 12 July 2012 | http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org |
| WikiSym 2011 | conference | 3 October 2011 | http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/ |
| RecentChangesCamp 2011 Boston | unconference | 11 March 2011 | http://recentchangescamp.org/wiki/Boston |
| WikiSym 2009 | conference | 25 October 2009 | http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/ |
| RecentChangesCamp 2009 | unconference | 20 February 2009 | http://2009rcc.org/ |
| RecentChangesCamp 2008 | unconference | 9 May 2008 | http://2008.recentchangescamp.org |
| RecentChangesCamp 2007 | unconference | 2 February 2007 | |
| Wikimania 2006 | conference | 6 August 2006 | http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org |
| RecentChangesCamp 2006 | unconference | 3 February 2006 | http://2006.recentchangescamp.org |
| WikiSym 2005 | conference | 14 October 2005 | http://www.wikisym.org/ws2005/ |
Authors
This is a list of authors in this country.Publications
This is a list of publications by authors of this country.| Title | Author(s) | Keyword(s) | Published in | Language | DateThis property is a special property in this wiki. | Abstract | R | C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staying in the Loop: Structure and Dynamics of Wikipedia's Breaking News Collaborations | Brian Keegan Darren Gergle Noshir Contractor |
Wikipedia High-tempo collaboration Network analysis Breaking news Collaboration Multigraph |
WikiSym | English | August 2012 | Despite the fact that Wikipedia articles about current events are more popular and attract more contributions than typical articles, canonical studies of Wikipedia have only analyzed articles about pre-existing information. We expect the co-authoring of articles about breaking news incidents to exhibit high-tempo coordination dynamics which are not found in articles about historical events and information. Using 1.03 million revisions made by 158,384 users to 3,233 English Wikipedia articles about disasters, catastrophes, and conflicts since 1990, we construct “article trajectories” of editor interactions as they coauthor an article. Examining a subset of this corpus, our analysis demonstrates that articles about current events exhibit structures and dynamics distinct from those observed among articles about non-breaking events. These findings have implications for how collective intelligence systems can be leveraged to process and make sense of complex information. | 0 | 0 |
| Towards Content-driven Reputation for Collaborative Code Repositories | Andrew G. West Insup Lee |
WikiTrust Wiki Code repository SVN Reputation Trust management Content persistence Code quality |
WikiSym | English | August 2012 | As evidenced by SourceForge and GitHub, code repositories now integrate Web 2.0 functionality that enables global participation with minimal barriers-to-entry. To prevent detrimental contributions enabled by crowdsourcing, reputation is one proposed solution. Fortunately this is an issue that has been addressed in analogous version control systems such as the *wiki* for natural language content. The WikiTrust algorithm ("content-driven reputation"), while developed and evaluated in wiki environments operates under a possibly shared collaborative assumption: actions that "survive" subsequent edits are reflective of good authorship. In this paper we examine WikiTrust's ability to measure author quality in collaborative code development. We first define a mapping from repositories to wiki environments and use it to evaluate a production SVN repository with 92,000 updates. Analysis is particularly attentive to reputation loss events and attempts to establish ground truth using commit comments and bug tracking. A proof-of-concept evaluation suggests the technique is promising (about two-thirds of reputation loss is justified) with false positives identifying areas for future refinement. Equally as important, these false positives exemplify differences in content evolution and the cooperative process between wikis and code repositories. | 0 | 0 |
| Spamming for Science: Active Measurement in Web 2.0 Abuse Research | Andrew G. West Pedram Hayati Vidyasagar Potdar Insup Lee |
WECSR | English | March 2012 | Spam and other electronic abuses have long been a focus of computer security research. However, recent work in the domain hasemphasized an *economic analysis* of these operations in the hope of understanding and disrupting the profit model of attackers. Such studies do not lend themselves to passive measurement techniques. Instead, researchers have become middle-men or active participants in spam behaviors; methodologies that lie at an interesting juncture of legal, ethical, and human subject (e.g., IRB) guidelines. In this work two such experiments serve as case studies: One testing a novel link spam model on Wikipedia and another using blackhat software to target blog comments and forums. Discussion concentrates on the experimental design process, especially as influenced by human-subject policy. Case studies are used to frame related work in the area, and scrutiny reveals the computer science community requires greater consistency in evaluating research of this nature. | 0 | 0 | |
| Open Wikis and the Protection of Institutional Welfare | Andrew G. West Insup Lee |
EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Research Bulletins | English | 7 February 2012 | Much has been written about wikis’ reliability and use in the classroom. This research bulletin addresses the negative impacts on institutional welfare that can arise from participating in and supporting wikis. The open nature of the platform, which is fundamental to wiki operation and success, enables these negative consequences. A finite user base that can be determined a priori (e.g., a course roster) minimizes the security implications, hence our discussion in this bulletin primarily concerns open or public wikis that accept contributions from a broad and unknown set of Internet users. | 0 | 0 | |
| Do editors or articles drive collaboration?: multilevel statistical network analysis of wikipedia coauthorship | Brian Keegan Darren Gergle Noshir Contractor |
Co-authorship Collaboration Ergm Exponential random graph model Network analysis Socio-material Wikipedia |
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work | English | 2012 | 0 | 0 | |
| Learning from history: predicting reverted work at the word level in wikipedia | Jeffrey Rzeszotarski Aniket Kittur |
Applied machine learning Reverted work Wikipedia |
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work | English | 2012 | 0 | 0 | |
| Omnipedia: Bridging the Wikipedia Language Gap | Patti Bao Brent Hecht Samuel Carton Mahmood Quaderi Michael Horn Darren Gergle |
Wikipedia Multilingual Hyperlingual Language barrier User generated content Text mining |
International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | English | 2012 | We present Omnipedia, a system that allows Wikipedia readers to gain insight from up to 25 language editions ofWikipedia simultaneously. Omnipedia highlights the similarities and differences that exist among Wikipedia language editions, and makes salient information that is unique to each language as well as that which is shared more widely. We detail solutions to numerous front-end and algorithmic challenges inherent to providing users with a multilingual Wikipedia experience. These include visualizing content in a language-neutral way and aligning data in the face of diverse information organization strategies. We present a study of Omnipedia that characterizes how people interact with information using a multilingual lens. We found that users actively sought information exclusive to unfamiliar language editions and strategically compared how language editions defined concepts. Finally, we briefly discuss how Omnipedia generalizes to other domains facing language barriers. | 0 | 0 |
| Is Wikipedia Inefficient? Modelling Effort and Participation in Wikipedia | Kevin Crowston Nicolas Jullien Felipe Ortega |
Data Envelopment Analysis Efficiency Wikipedia |
HICSS 2013 | English | 17 November 2011 | Concerns have been raisedabout the decreased ability of Wikipedia to recruit editors and in to harness the effort of contributors to create new articles and imp | 0 | 0 |
| Autonomous Link Spam Detection in Purely Collaborative Environments | Andrew G. West Avantika Agrawal Phillip Baker Brittney Exline Insup Lee |
Wikipedia Collaboration Collaborative security Information security Spam Spam mitigation Reputation Spatio- temporal features Machine learning Intelligent routing |
WikiSym | English | October 2011 | Collaborative models (e.g., wikis) are an increasingly prevalent Web technology. However, the open-access that defines such systems can also be utilized for nefarious purposes. In particular, this paper examines the use of collaborative functionality to add inappropriate hyperlinks to destinations outside the host environment (i.e., link spam). The collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is the basis for our analysis.
Recent research has exposed vulnerabilities in Wikipedia's link spam mitigation, finding that human editors are latent and dwindling in quantity. To this end, we propose and develop an autonomous classifier for link additions. Such a system presents unique challenges. For example, low barriers-to-entry invite a diversity of spam types, not just those with economic motivations. Moreover, issues can arise with how a link is presented (regardless of the destination). In this work, a spam corpus is extracted from over 235,000 link additions to English Wikipedia. From this, 40+ features are codified and analyzed. These indicators are computed using "wiki" metadata, landing site analysis, and external data sources. The resulting classifier attains 64% recall at 0.5% false-positives (ROC-AUC=0.97). Such performance could enable egregious link additions to be blocked automatically with low false-positive rates, while prioritizing the remainder for human inspection. Finally, a live Wikipedia implementation of the technique has been developed. |
0 | 0 |
| What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content | Andrew G. West Insup Lee |
Wikipedia User generated content Collaboration Redaction Content removal Copyright Information security |
WikiSym | English | October 2011 | Collaborative environments, such as Wikipedia, often have low barriers-to-entry in order to encourage participation. This accessibility is frequently abused (e.g., vandalism and spam). However, certain inappropriate behaviors are more threatening than others. In this work, we study contributions which are not simply ``undone -- but *deleted* from revision histories and public view. Such treatment is generally reserved for edits which: (1) present a legal liability to the host (e.g., copyright issues, defamation), or (2) present privacy threats to individuals (i.e., contact information). Herein, we analyze one year of Wikipedia's public deletion log and use brute-force strategies to learn about privately handled redactions. This permits insight about the prevalence of deletion, the reasons that induce it, and the extent of end-user exposure to dangerous content. While Wikipedia's approach is generally quite reactive, we find that copyright issues prove most problematic of those behaviors studied. | 0 | 1 |
| Link Spamming Wikipedia for Profit | Andrew G. West Jian Chang Krishna Venkatasubramanian Oleg Sokolsky Insup Lee |
Web 2.0 spam Spam Wikipedia Wiki Collaborative security Attack model Measurement study Spam economics |
CEAS '11: Proc. of the 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse, and Spam Conference | English | September 2011 | Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks.
Our analysis focuses on the wiki model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize *exposure*, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we propose a model that exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement. Statistical estimation suggests our novel model would produce significantly more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its exploitation. To this end, we address mitigation strategies. |
0 | 0 |
| Multilingual Vandalism Detection using Language-Independent & Ex Post Facto Evidence | Andrew G. West Insup Lee |
PAN-CLEF | English | September 2011 | There is much literature on Wikipedia vandalism detection. However, this writing addresses two facets given little treatment to date. First, prior efforts emphasize zero-delay detection, classifying edits the moment they are made. If classification can be delayed (e.g., compiling offline distributions), it is possible to leverage ex post facto evidence. This work describes/evaluates several features of this type, which we find to be overwhelmingly strong vandalism indicators.
Second, English Wikipedia has been the primary test-bed for research. Yet, Wikipedia has 200+ language editions and use of localized features impairs portability. This work implements an extensive set of language-independent indicators and evaluates them using three corpora (German, English, Spanish). The work then extends to include language-specific signals. Quantifying their performance benefit, we find that such features can moderately increase classifier accuracy, but significant effort and language fluency are required to capture this utility. Aside from these novel aspects, this effort also broadly addresses the task, implementing 65 total features. Evaluation produces 0.840 PR-AUC on thezero-delay task and 0.906 PR-AUC with ex post facto evidence (averaging languages). Performance matches the state-of-the-art (English), sets novel baselines (German, Spanish), and is validated by a first-place finish over the 2011 PAN-CLEF test set. |
0 | 0 | |
| To Wiki or Not to Wiki? | Lori Byrd Phillips | Museum | English | September 2011 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Design Mechanisms for MediaWiki to Support Collaborative Writing in a Mandatory Context | Sumonta Kasemvilas | Design Information technology Educational technology |
English | August 2011 | Because MediaWiki is not appropriate for use in the classroom setting due to its decentralization, arbitrariness, and sharing, its flexible characteristics complicate concepts of practical design when applying MediaWiki in a mandatory writing context. This dissertation identifies a need to add extensions to facilitate increased accountability, project management, discussion, and awareness based on a theoretical framework, proposes MediaWiki with some modifications as an innovative way to optimize the strengths associated with constructivist learning and social presence, and examines the results of those changes. Relevant theoretical perspectives are used to contextualize the potential significance of additional extensions of MediaWiki. Three categories of mechanisms in MediaWiki—role, awareness, and project management—were newly developed in this research. They are designed to increase project control and accountability. Discussion, chat, text editor, and online notification extensions were also installed and customized to meet the needs of the students. Two case studies were conducted in two separate graduate classes to test the value of the extensions. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. Use of qualitative methods helps add texture to quantitative findings. The findings illustrate some potential impact for classroom use. Delineation of the results in Case Study 1 and Case Study 2 provides well-grounded rationale for why the proposed new MediaWiki mechanisms positively impact collaborative writing. By applying a set of extended features to MediaWiki, some problems were solved and others were mitigated, but other problems were not resolved and new problems emerged. Thus, this study articulates the benefits and the additional problems using MediaWiki and extensions and suggests ways to improve the group writing process. Using MediaWiki in academia needs appropriate governance and proper technology. The results potentially offer new teaching mechanisms for graduate students involved with collaborative writing. The study holds promise in improving collaborative efforts in mandatory group writing projects and discusses a way to facilitate collaborative writing in this context. Implications of this study can assist researchers and developers in understanding what effects the extensions have on users. | 26 | 0 | |
| Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia | Andrew A. Famiglietti | Wikipedia Peer Production Cultural Studies New Media Political Economy |
English | May 2011 | This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers. I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia's actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia's content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles. | 70 | 0 | |
| Sustainable multilingual communication: Managing multilingual content using free and open source content management systems | Todd Kelsey | English | May 2011 | It is often too complicated or expensive for most educators, non-profits and individuals to create and maintain a multilingual Web site, because of the technological hurdles, and the logistics of working with content in different languages. But multilingual content management systems, combined with streamlined processes and inexpensive organizational tools, make it possible for educators, non-profit entities and individuals with limited resources to develop sustainable and accessible multilingual Web sites. The research included a review of what's been done in the theory and practice of designing Web sites for multilingual audiences. On the basis of that review, a series of sustainable multilingual Web sites were created, and a series of approaches and systems were tested, including MediaWiki, Plone, Drupal, Joomla, PHPMyFAQ, Blogger, Google Docs and Google Sites. There was also a case study on "Social CMS", which refers to emergent social networks such as Facebook. The case studies are reported on, and conclude with high-level recommendations that form a roadmap for sustainable multilingual Web site development. The basic conclusion is that Drupal is a recommended system for developing a multilingual Web site, based on a variety of factors. Google Sites is also a recommended system, based on the fact that it is free, easy to use, and very flexible. | 9 | 0 | ||
| Wikipedia Vandalism Detection: Combining Natural Language, Metadata, and Reputation Features | B. Thomas Adler Luca de Alfaro Santiago M. Mola Velasco Paolo Rosso Andrew G. West |
Wikipedia Wiki Collaboration Vandalism Machine learning Metadata Natural Language Processing Reputation |
Lecture notes in computer science | English | February 2011 | Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit. While most edits are constructive, about 7% are acts of vandalism. Such behavior is characterized by modifications made in bad faith; introducing spam and other inappropriate content. In this work, we present the results of an effort to integrate three of the leading approaches to Wikipedia vandalism detection: a spatio-temporal analysis of metadata (STiki), a reputation-based system (WikiTrust), and natural language processing features. The performance of the resulting joint system improves the state-of-the-art from all previous methods and establishes a new baseline for Wikipedia vandalism detection. We examine in detail the contribution of the three approaches, both for the task of discovering fresh vandalism, and for the task of locating vandalism in the complete set of Wikipedia revisions. | 0 | 1 |
| Don't bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work | Aaron Halfaker Aniket Kittur John Riedl |
WikiWork Wikipedia Experience Motivation Productivity Quality Revert |
WikiSym | English | 2011 | Reverts are important to maintaining the quality of Wikipedia. They fix mistakes, repair vandalism, and help enforce policy. However, reverts can also be damaging, especially to the aspiring editor whose work they destroy. In this research we analyze 400,000 Wikipedia revisions to understand the effect that reverts had on editors. We seek to understand the extent to which they demotivate users, reducing the workforce of contributors, versus the extent to which they help users improve as encyclopedia editors. Overall we find that reverts are powerfully demotivating, but that their net influence is that more quality work is done in Wikipedia as a result of reverts than is lost by chasing editors away. However, we identify key conditions – most specifically new editors being reverted by much more experienced editors – under which reverts are particularly damaging. We propose that reducing the damage from reverts might be one effective path for Wikipedia to solve the newcomer retention problem. | 0 | 0 |
| Hot off the Wiki: Dynamics, Practices, and Structures in Wikipedia’s Coverage of the Tōhoku Catastrophes | Brian Keegan Darren Gergle Darren Contractor |
Wikipedia Breaking news Current events Network analysis Bipartite network Emergent group High tempo Collaboration |
WikiSym | English | 2011 | Wikipedia editors are uniquely motivated to collaborate around current and breaking news events. However, the speed, urgency, and intensity with which these collaborations unfold also impose a substantial burden on editors’ abilities to effectively coordinate tasks and process information. We analyze the patterns of activity on Wikipedia following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami to understand the dynamics of editor attention and participation, novel practices employed to collaborate on these articles, and the resulting coauthorship structures which emerge between editors and articles. Our findings have implications for supporting future coverage of breaking news articles, theorizing about motivations to participate in online community, and illuminating Wikipedia’s potential role in storing cultural memories of catastrophe. | 0 | 0 |
| Identifying shared leadership in Wikipedia | Haiyi Zhu Robert E. Kraut Yi C. Wang Aniket Kittur |
Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems | English | 2011 | In this paper, we introduce a method to measure shared leadership in Wikipedia as a step in developing a new model of online leadership. We show that editors with varying degrees of engagement and from peripheral as well as central roles all act like leaders, but that core and peripheral editors show different profiles of leadership behavior. Specifically, we developed machine learning models to automatically identify four types of leadership behaviors from 4 million messages sent between Wikipedia editors. We found strong evidence of shared leadership in Wikipedia, with editors in peripheral roles producing a large proportion of leadership behaviors. | 4 | 1 | |
| Link spamming Wikipedia for profit | Andrew G. West Jian Chang Krishna Venkatasubramanian Oleg Sokolsky Insup Lee |
Wikipedia Attack model Collaborative security Spam Measurement study Spam economics Web 2.0 spam Wiki |
CEAS | English | 2011 | Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks.
Our analysis focuses on the wiki model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize *exposure*, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly in this regard. The status quo spamming model relies on link persistence to accumulate exposures, a strategy that fails given the diligence of the Wikipedia community. Instead, we propose a model that exploits the latency inherent in human anti-spam enforcement. Statistical estimation suggests our novel model would produce significantly more link exposures than status quo techniques. More critically, the strategy could prove economically viable for perpetrators, incentivizing its exploitation. To this end, we address mitigation strategies. |
0 | 0 |
| What Wikipedia deletes: characterizing dangerous collaborative content | Andrew G. West Insup Lee |
Wikipedia Collaboration Content removal Copyright Information security Redaction User generated content |
WikiSym | English | 2011 | Collaborative environments, such as Wikipedia, often have low barriers-to-entry in order to encourage participation. This accessibility is frequently abused (e.g., vandalism and spam). However, certain inappropriate behaviors are more threatening than others. In this work, we study contributions which are not simply ``undone -- but *deleted* from revision histories and public view. Such treatment is generally reserved for edits which: (1) present a legal liability to the host (e.g., copyright issues, defamation), or (2) present privacy threats to individuals (i.e., contact information). Herein, we analyze one year of Wikipedia's public deletion log and use brute-force strategies to learn about privately handled redactions. This permits insight about the prevalence of deletion, the reasons that induce it, and the extent of end-user exposure to dangerous content. While Wikipedia's approach is generally quite reactive, we find that copyright issues prove most problematic of those behaviors studied. | 0 | 1 |
| WikiLit: Collecting the Wiki and Wikipedia Literature | Phoebe Ayers Reid Priedhorsky |
Wiki Wikipedia Research literature Literature database |
WikiSym | English | 2011 | This workshop has three key goals. First, we will examine existing and proposed systems for collecting and analyzing the research literature about wikis. Second, we will discuss the challenges in building such a system and will engage participants to design a sustainable collaborative system to achieve this goal. Finally, we will provide a forum to build upon ongoing wiki community discussions about problems and opportunities in finding and sharing the wiki research literature. | 1 | 0 |
| Trust in Collaborative Web Applications | Andrew G. West Jian Chang Krishna Venkatasubramanian Insup Lee |
Future Generation Computer Systems, special section on Trusting Software Behavior | English | October 2010 | Collaborative functionality is increasingly prevalent in Internet applications. Such functionality permits individuals to add -- and sometimes modify -- web content, often with minimal barriers to entry. Ideally, large bodies of knowledge can be amassed and shared in this manner. However, such software also provides a medium for biased individuals, spammers, and nefarious persons to operate. By computing trust/reputation for participating agents and/or the content they generate, one can identify quality contributions. In this work, we survey the state-of-the-art for calculating trust in collaborative content. In particular, we examine four proposals from literature based on: (1) content persistence, (2) natural-language processing, (3) metadata properties, and (4) incoming link quantity. Though each technique can be applied broadly, Wikipedia provides a focal point for discussion. Finally, having critiqued how trust values are calculated, we analyze how the presentation of these values can benefit end-users and application security. | 0 | 0 | |
| STiki: An Anti-Vandalism Tool for Wikipedia Using Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata | Andrew G. West Sampath Kannan Insup Lee |
Wikipedia Collaboration software Information security Intelligent routing Spatio-temporal processing |
WikiSym | English | July 2010 | STiki is an anti-vandalism tool for Wikipedia. Unlike similar tools, STiki does not rely on natural language processing (NLP) over the article or diff text to locate vandalism. Instead, STiki leverages spatio-temporal properties of revision metadata. The feasibility of utilizing such properties was demonstrated in our prior work, which found they perform comparably to NLP-efforts while being more efficient, robust to evasion, and language independent. STiki is a real-time, on-Wikipedia implementation based on these properties. It consists of, (1) a server-side processing engine that examines revisions, scoring the likelihood each is vandalism, and, (2) a client-side GUI that presents likely vandalism to end-users for definitive classiffcation (and if necessary, reversion on Wikipedia). Our demonstration will provide an introduction to spatio-temporal properties, demonstrate the STiki software, and discuss alternative research uses for the open-source code. | 0 | 0 |
| Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism via Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata | Andrew G. West Sampath Kannan Insup Lee |
Wikipedia Spatio-temporal reputation Vandalism Collaboration software Content-based access control |
EUROSEC | English | April 2010 | Blatantly unproductive edits undermine the quality of the collaboratively-edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia. They not only disseminate dishonest and offensive content, but force editors to waste time undoing such acts of vandalism. Language-processing has been applied to combat these malicious edits, but as with email spam, these filters are evadable and computationally complex. Meanwhile, recent research has shown spatial and temporal features effective in mitigating email spam, while being lightweight and robust. In this paper, we leverage the spatio-temporal properties of revision metadata to detect vandalism on Wikipedia. An administrative form of reversion called rollback enables the tagging of malicious edits, which are contrasted with nonoffending edits in numerous dimensions. Crucially, none of these features require inspection of the article or revision text. Ultimately, a classifier is produced which flags vandalism at performance comparable to the natural-language efforts we intend to complement (85% accuracy at 50% recall). The classifier is scalable (processing 100+ edits a second) and has been used to locate over 5,000 manually-confirmed incidents of vandalism outside our labeled set. | 9 | 3 |
| A hypersocial-interactive model of Wiki-mediated writing: Collaborative writing in a fan & gamer community | Rik Hunter | English | 2010 | In this dissertation I argue that writing is a technologically- and socially-inflected activity, and the particular patterns of collaborative writing found on the World of Warcraft Wiki (WoWWiki) are the result of the interactions between a MediaWiki's affordances and the social practices operating in this context. In other contexts, collaborative writing can more closely resemble the "conventional ethos" (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007) of more individualistic notions of authorship often tied to print. With writing projects such as WoWWiki, we can observe a dramatic shift in notions of textual ownership and production towards the communal and collaborative, and I suggest the patterns of collaboration found on WoWWki are evidence of a larger technocultural shift signaling new conditions for literacy. In the midst of this shift, the meaning of "collaboration," "authorship," and "audience" is redefined.
Following my introductory chapter, I use textual analysis of talk pages to examine the talk pages of several of WoWWiki featured articles for particular patterns of language use and identify what WoWWikians focus their attention on in the process of writing articles. I argue that collaboration on WoWWiki poses a challenge to models of face to face writing groups and offers unique patterns of collaboration. I then contend that WoWWiki's writing practices are entering a society where the idea of the single author has been strong. Nevertheless, I find evidence of a shared model of text production and collaborative notion of authorship; further, collaboration is disrupted by those who hold author-centric perspectives. Next, I argue that our previous models of audience and writing previously developed around print and, later, hypertext are inadequate because they cannot account for roles readers can take and how writers and readers interact on a wiki. With this new arrangement in collaborative writing evident on WoWWiki, I develop the hypersocial-interactive model of wiki-mediated writing. I conclude by reviewing this dissertation's main arguments regarding wiki-mediated collaborative writing, after which I explore the implications of using wikis for writing instruction. Finally, I discuss the limitations of this study and consider directions for future research on voluntary collaborative wiki-mediated writing. |
22 | 0 | ||
| Beyond Wikipedia: Coordination and Conflict in Online Production Groups | Aniket Kittur Robert E. Kraut |
Wiki Wikipedia Coordination Conflict Social computing Collective intelligence Distributed cognition Collaboration Online production |
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work | English | 2010 | Online production groups have the potential to transform the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated. One of the most widely used forms of online production is the wiki, which has been used in domains ranging from science to education to enterprise. We examined the development of and interactions between coordination and conflict in a sample of 6811 wiki production groups. We investigated the influence of four coordination mechanisms: intra-article communication, inter-user communication, concentration of workgroup structure, and policy and procedures. We also examined the growth of conflict, finding the density of users in an information space to be a significant predictor. Finally, we analyzed the effectiveness of the four coordination mechanisms on managing conflict, finding differences in how each scaled to large numbers of contributors. Our results suggest that coordination mechanisms effective for managing conflict are not always the same as those effective for managing task quality, and that designers must take into account the social benefits of coordination mechanisms in addition to their production benefits. | 0 | 2 |
| Socialization tactics in Wikipedia and their effects | Boreum Choi Kira Alexander Robert E. Kraut John M. Levine |
Socialization Wikipedia WikiProject |
English | 2010 | Socialization of newcomers is critical both for conventional groups. It helps groups perform effectively and the newcomers develop commitment. However, little empirical research has investigated the impact of specific socialization tactics on newcomers' commitment to online groups. We examined WikiProjects, subgroups in Wikipedia organized around working on common topics or tasks. In study 1, we identified the seven socialization tactics used most frequently: invitations to join, welcome messages, requests to work on project-related tasks, offers of assistance, positive feedback on a new member's work, constructive criticism, and personal-related comments. In study 2, we examined their impact on newcomers' commitment to the project. Whereas most newcomers contributed fewer edits over time, the declines were slowed or reversed for those socialized with welcome messages, assistance, and constructive criticism. In contrast, invitations led to steeper declines in edits. These results suggest that different socialization tactics play different roles in socializing new members in online groups compared to offline ones. | 0 | 1 | |
| Spatio-temporal analysis of Wikipedia metadata and the STiki anti-vandalism tool | Andrew G. West Sampath Kannan Insup Lee |
WikiSym | English | 2010 | 0 | 0 | ||
| The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and Its Applications in a Multilingual Context | Brent Hecht Darren Gergle |
International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | English | 2010 | This study explores language's fragmenting effect on user-generated content by examining the diversity of knowledge representations across 25 different Wikipedia language editions. This diversity is measured at two levels: the concepts that are included in each edition and the ways in which these concepts are described. We demonstrate that the diversity present is greater than has been presumed in the literature and has a significant influence on applications that use Wikipedia as a source of world knowledge. We close by explicating how knowledge diversity can be beneficially leveraged to create "culturally-aware applications" and "hyperlingual applications". | 0 | 1 | |
| Using a Combination of Studios, Mini-lectures, Class Blog and Wiki to Motivate Students' Learning in Web Technology Courses | Xuesong (Sonya) Zhang Lorne Olfman |
E-learning Course design Web technology |
ITNG | English | 2010 | 0 | 0 | |
| A Jury of Your Peers: Quality, Experience and Ownership in Wikipedia | Aaron Halfaker Aniket Kittur Robert E. Kraut John Riedl |
WikiWork Wikipedia Experience Ownership Peer Peer review Quality |
WikiSym | English | 2009 | Wikipedia is a highly successful example of what mass collaboration in an informal peer review system can accomplish. In this paper, we examine the role that the quality of the contributions, the experience of the contributors and the ownership of the content play in the decisions over which contributions become part of Wikipedia and which ones are rejected by the community. We introduce and justify a versatile metric for automatically measuring the quality of a contribution. We find little evidence that experience helps contributors avoid rejection. In fact, as they gain experience, contributors are even more likely to have their work rejected. We also find strong evidence of ownership behaviors in practice despite the fact that ownership of content is discouraged within Wikipedia. | 0 | 3 |
| Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki to Support Collaborative Writing in Higher Education Classes | Sumonta Kasemvilas Lorne Olfman |
Awareness Collaborative writing Constructivist learning Design science research Talk page Evaluation MediaWiki Project management Web 2.0 |
Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology | English | 2009 | Constructivist learning mechanisms such as collaborative writing have emerged as a result of the development of Web 2.0 technologies. We define the term mandatory collaborative writing to describe a writing activity where the group has a firm deadline. Our study focuses on how a wiki can fully support mandatory group writing. The motivation of this design science research study emerges from a graduate Knowledge Management class assignment to write a wiki book. The project outcome shows that the wiki instance used for the project, MediaWiki, could better facilitate the process with a set of extensions that support discussion, evaluation, and project management. We outline designs for these mechanisms: 1) a discussion mechanism that changes the way users discuss content on a wiki page and increases group awareness; 2) an evaluation mechanism that provides a tool for the instructor to monitor and assess students’ performance; and 3) a project management tool that increases awareness of the status of each component of the writing project and provides an overall summary of the project. A demonstration of the principles to a focus group provided a basic proof of the validity of these mechanisms. | 16 | 1 |
| Measuring Self-Focus Bias in Community-Maintained Knowledge Repositories | Brent Hecht Darren Gergle |
International Conference on Communities and Technologies | English | 2009 | Self-focus is a novel way of understanding a type of bias in community-maintained Web 2.0 graph structures. It goes beyond previous measures of topical coverage bias by encapsulating both node- and edge-hosted biases in a single holistic measure of an entire community-maintained graph. We outline two methods to quantify self-focus, one of which is very computationally inexpensive, and present empirical evidence for the existence of self-focus using a "hyperlingual" approach that examines 15 different language editions of Wikipedia. We suggest applications of our methods and discuss the risks of ignoring self-focus bias in technological applications. | 0 | 0 | |
| What's in Wikipedia?: mapping topics and conflict using socially annotated category structure | Aniket Kittur Ed H. Chi Bongwon Suh |
Wikipedia Annotation Conflict Distributed collaboration Mapping Social computing Visualisation Wiki |
CHI | English | 2009 | 0 | 1 | |
| What’s in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure | Aniket Kittur Ed H. Chi Bongwon Suh |
English | 2009 | 0 | 0 | |||
| Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia | Katherine Panciera Aaron Halfaker Loren Terveen |
GROUP | English | 2009 | Open content web sites depend on users to produce information of value. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known such site. Previous work has shown that a small fraction of editors --Wikipedians -- do most of the work and produce most of the value. Other work has offered conjectures about how Wikipedians differ from other editors and how Wikipedians change over time. We quantify and test these conjectures. Our key findings include: Wikipedians' edits last longer; Wikipedians invoke community norms more often to justify their edits; on many dimensions of activity, Wikipedians start intensely, tail off a little, then maintain a relatively high level of activity over the course of their career. Finally, we show that the amount of work done by Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians differs significantly from their very first day. Our results suggest a design opportunity: customizing the initial user experience to improve retention and channel new users' intense energy. | 0 | 4 | |
| The motivational arc of massive virtual collaboration | Kevin Crowston Isabelle Fagnot |
Massive virtual collaboration Motivation Wikipedia Open source |
IFIP WG 9.5 Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities | English | 1 July 2008 | Massive virtual collaborations (MVC) involve large numbers of mostly unpaid
contributors collectively creating new content. Wikipedia is the most dramatic example of MVC; smaller-scale examples include blogs and discussion groups and free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects. In this paper, we propose a model of motivations for contribution to MVC that integrates various theoretical perspectives to extend prior work. Specifically, we distinguish three different levels of contribution to projects (initial, sustained and meta) and capture the dynamic and recursive effects of contributions on emergent individual and project states. |
0 | 0 |
| Can you ever trust a wiki?: impacting perceived trustworthiness in Wikipedia | Aniket Kittur Bongwon Suh Ed H. Chi |
English | 2008 | Wikipedia has become one of the most important information resources on the Web by promoting peer collaboration and enabling virtually anyone to edit anything. However, this mutability also leads many to distrust it as a reliable source of information. Although there have been many attempts at developing metrics to help users judge the trustworthiness of content, it is unknown how much impact such measures can have on a system that is perceived as inherently unstable. Here we examine whether a visualization that exposes hidden article information can impact readers' perceptions of trustworthiness in a wiki environment. Our results suggest that surfacing information relevant to the stability of the article and the patterns of editor behavior can have a significant impact on users' trust across a variety of page types. | 0 | 0 | ||
| Fine-grained addressability to support large-scale collaborative document development | Viral Gupta | Computer science Large-scale documents |
English | January 2008 | The Web has made it possible for large, distributed collaborations to develop sophisticated document bases. As these collaborations increase in size, there is a need to support reference, navigation and search through the document bases by individuals who are not computer pro-fessionals. Although collaborative tools such as wikis have been developed that address some of the requirements of these communities, the tools lack support for simple and convenient fine-grained addressability to parts of the documents. Such addressability is essential for formal documents, such as standards and legal documents. In this thesis we develop a solution to the problem of fine-grained addressability that is based on MediaWiki, a popular and powerful col- laboration tool that is the software infrastructure for Wikipedia. Although some collaboration tools that support fine-grained addressability already exist, they have not addressed some of the open research issues of fine-grained addressability, such as dealing with transclusion, semantic annotation and hyperscope support. It also deals with the research problems that were raised by this goal. An architecture and reference implementation was developed to provide a proof of concept and to test the viability of the proposed solutions to the research problems. The thesis also discusses the various design decisions that were made in the course of solving the research problems and developing the reference implementation. | 0 | 0 | |
| Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: quality through coordination | Aniket Kittur Robert E. Kraut |
English | 2008 | Wikipedia's success is often attributed to the large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the coordination needed to write an article collaboratively, adding contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors structure the work by doing the majority of it. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments. | 0 | 2 | ||
| How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It | Phoebe Ayers Charles Matthews Ben Yates |
English | 2008 | 0 | 1 | |||
| Lifting the veil: improving accountability and social transparency in Wikipedia with wikidashboard | Bongwon Suh Ed H. Chi Aniket Kittur Bryan A. Pendleton |
English | 2008 | Wikis are collaborative systems in which virtually anyone can edit anything. Although wikis have become highly popular in many domains, their mutable nature often leads them to be distrusted as a reliable source of information. Here we describe a social dynamic analysis tool called WikiDashboard which aims to improve social transparency and accountability on Wikipedia articles. Early reactions from users suggest that the increased transparency afforded by the tool can improve the interpretation, communication, and trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles. | 0 | 3 | ||
| Mopping up: modeling wikipedia promotion decisions | Moira Burke Robert E. Kraut |
Administrators Collaboration Management Organizational behavior Policy capture Promotion Wikipedia |
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work | English | 2008 | This paper presents a model of the behavior of candidates for promotion to administrator status in Wikipedia. It uses a policy capture framework to highlight similarities and differences in the community's stated criteria for promotion decisions to those criteria actually correlated with promotion success. As promotions are determined by the consensus of dozens of voters with conflicting opinions and unwritten expectations, the results highlight the degree to which consensus is truly reached. The model is fast and easily computable on the fly, and thus could be applied as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering becoming administrators, as a dashboard for voters to view a nominee's relevant statistics, or as a tool to automatically search for likely future administrators. Implications for distributed consensus-building in online communities are discussed. | 0 | 1 |
| Taking up the mop: identifying future Wikipedia administrators | Moira Burke Robert E. Kraut |
English | 2008 | 0 | 0 | |||
| He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia | Aniket Kittur Bongwon Suh Bryan A. Pendleton Ed H. Chi |
English | 2007 | Wikipedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia, has become one of the most successful experiments in collaborative knowledge building on the Internet. As Wikipedia continues to grow, the potential for conflict and the need for coordination increase as well. This article examines the growth of such non-direct work and describes the development of tools to characterize conflict and coordination costs in Wikipedia. The results may inform the design of new collaborative knowledge systems. | 0 | 16 | ||
| Us vs. Them: Understanding Social Dynamics in Wikipedia with Revert Graph Visualizations | Bongwon Suh Ed H. Chi Bryan A. Pendleton Aniket Kittur |
Visual Analytics Science and Technology | English | 2007 | Wikipedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia that has become one of the most popular collaborative on-line knowledge systems. As in any large collaborative system, as Wikipedia has grown, conflicts and coordination costs have increased dramatically. Visual analytic tools provide a mechanism for addressing these issues by enabling users to more quickly and effectively make sense of the status of a collaborative environment. In this paper we describe a model for identifying patterns of conflicts in Wikipedia articles. The model relies on users' editing history and the relationships between user edits, especially revisions that void previous edits, known as "reverts". Based on this model, we constructed Revert Graph, a tool that visualizes the overall conflict patterns between groups of users. It enables visual analysis of opinion groups and rapid interactive exploration of those relationships via detail drill- downs. We present user patterns and case studies that show the effectiveness of these techniques, and discuss how they could generalize to other systems. | 0 | 4 | |
| Researching Wikipedia ‐ Current approaches and new directions | Phoebe Ayers | Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology | English | 2006 | Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), an international, multi-lingual and collaboratively produced free online encyclopedia, has experienced massive growth since its inception in 2001. The site has become the world’s single largest encyclopedia as well as one of the world's most diverse online communities. Because of these factors, the site provides a unique view into the processes of collaborative work and the factors that go into producing encyclopedic content. To date, there has been no unified review of the current research that is taking place on and about Wikipedia, and indeed there have been few formal studies of the site, despite its growing importance. This project is a review of social science and information science studies of the site, focusing on research methods and categorizing the areas of the site that have been studied so far. Studies of Wikipedia have focused primarily on the social dynamics of contributors (such as how disputes are resolved and why contributors participate), and the content of Wikipedia (such as whether it is an accurate source), but due to the unique collaborative processes on Wikipedia these two areas are deeply intertwined. | 17 | 0 | |
| WikiGateway: A Toolbox for Making Software that Reads and Writes Wikis | Bayle Shanks | WebDAV WikiClient WikiGateway WikiRPCInterface Atom Client-side wiki Interoperability Interwiki Middleware Wiki Wiki XMLRPC |
WikiSym | English | 2006 | 0 | 0 | |
| WikiGateway - A Library for Interoperability and Accelerated Wiki Development | Bayle Shanks | Wiki Interwiki Interoperability WikiGateway Client-side wiki WikiClient Middleware Atom WebDAV WikiRPCInterface Wiki XMLRPC |
WikiSym | English | 2005 | WikiGateway is an open-source suite of tools for automated interaction with wikis: * Python and Perl modules with functions like getPage, putPage, getRecentChanges, and more. * A mechanism to add DAV, Atom, or XMLRPC capabilities to any supported wiki server. * A command-line tool with functionality similar to the Perl and Python modules. * Demo applications built on top of these tools include a wiki copy command, a spam-cleaning bot, and a tool to recursively upload text files inside a directory structure as wiki pages. All WikiGateway tools are compatible with a number of different wiki engines. Developers can use WikiGateway to hide the differences between wiki engines and build applications which interoperate with many different wiki engines. | 0 | 0 |
| Wikipedia in the free culture revolution | Jimmy Wales | OOPSLA | English | 2005 | 0 | 0 | ||
| The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource | Richard M. Stallman | English Spanish |
1999 | 0 | 1 | |||
| As We May Think | Vannevar Bush | The Atlantic | English | 1945 | 0 | 0 |
