Call for Participation
2005 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON WIKIS (WikiSym 2005)
Oct 16-18, San Diego, California, U.S.A.
http://www.wikisym.org
WikiSym 2005 features keynotes by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the
wiki), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and Robert Hass (former
U.S. poet laureate). The program offers a research paper track
providing the best in current wiki research, as well as workshops,
tutorials, demos, and social events. Everyone who is involved in
using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to participate!
WikiSym 2005 is co-located with ACM OOPSLA and is an ACM sponsored,
archival, peer-reviewed conference. The proceedings will be available
at the conference and through the ACM digital library.
For more information, please see our website at
http://www.wikisym.org or our conference wiki at http://wiki.wikisym.org
For what it's worth -- unless we already have a scheme for producing bibtex
-- here's my bibliographies and annotations (basically [1]) on 7 of the
papers. Unfortunately, many of the papers are still not present; also,
anyone know when the streams will be up? [2] still says "None available as
of yet. Check back after the first day of the WikiMania program.".
[1] http://reagle.org/joseph/plan/search.cgi?query=wikimania
[2] http://freematrix.us/radio/wikimania
Hi,
Just something that occurs to me as I write up my dissertation - I
keep on thinking it would be nice to be able to cite some basic
figures to back up a point I am making, eg. how many times Wikipedia
is edited on a given day or how many pages link to this policy page -
as I asked in an email to the wikipedia-l list, which has mysteriously
vanished from the archives (August 11, entitled "What links here?"). I
realise these could be done by going to the recent changes or special
pages and counting them all, but I'm basically too lazy to do that -
we're talking about thousands of pages here, right? I'm also thinking
this is something that many people would be interested in finding out
and writing about. So what I'm asking is that to help researchers
generally, wouldn't it be an idea to identify some quick database
hacks that we could provide - almost like a kate's tools function? Or
are these available on the MediaWiki pages? If they are, and I've
looked at some database related pages, they're certainly not so
understandable from the perspective of someone who just wants to use
basic functions. You might be thinking of sending me to a page like
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Links_table - but *what does it mean?*
Can someone either help me out, or suggest what we could do about this
in the future?
Cheers,
Cormac
Colleagues,
A group of us had a rather interesting discussion on privacy, etc at
Wikimania. Not wanting to lose the momentum of that discussion I took
a stab at starting an article on a research policy statement. This is
just a start, please feel free to have at it and thank you for your
help!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Network_Privacy_Policy
Kevin
Kevin J. Gamble. Ph.D.
Associate Director eXtension Initiative
Box 7641 NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27694-7641
v: 919.515.8447
c: 919.605.5815
AIM: k1v1n
Web: intranet.extension.org
Dear Andrew Lih,
dear scientific community,
I am a bit disappointed about the available material
that tries to measure the quality of Wikipedia articles.
The quoted newspaper article of the Wall street journal
for example just analyses technical topics but it would
be a dangerous claim to assume that quality is equally
distributed over the different fields and topics.
But you need that claim as condition for the method
of randomly picking articles and conclude for the rest.
There was another attempt to compare the Quality of
Wikipedia with other Encyclopedias in the German Computer
Newspaper C't with the same random approach.
(1) But there is a problem since it is a random way of
choosing articles to compare or to analyse. I see
some problems in non technical fields such as soft
sciences (in social science for example every theory
on society redefines all concepts of society on it's
own: how can an encyclopedia claim to have a definition?).
(2) Political terms are sometimes very complex topics
where the NPOV may not work, because there is no
right nor wrong. It is often a question of opinion
and majority that sometimes changes reality.
I observed a discussion and an edit war on the article
about Direct Democracy (in the Germen Wikipedia:
article "Direkte Demokratie") that led to a loss
of quality: only a minimal and weak consens
survived the different opinions: the evolutionary
process did not improve quality in that case.
(3) The third problem is the tendency of specific groups
that lead to vandalism. There are groups that use
values or ideologies and reject a neutral or scientific
view (moralists, religious groups, nationalists,
neocapitalists etc.). What about articles that are
important for these groups? Are these article tendentious?
My question: Is there a scientific study on the
quality of the Wikipedia ariticles? Does anyone
work on that problems? What methods could be used
to analyse the Quality?
Ingo Frost
(studies Wikipedia from a social system science view)
Hi all,
Hope to see many of you at Wikimania next week (yes, it's only one week
away).
I want to propose some time is carved out for a BOAF session for wiki
researchers. Seems Friday and Sunday eves are free, or it could be Thursday
before things get started.
Here are some issues I'd love to talk to other folks about, please feel
free to add:
1. Heuristics for recognizing patterns in edit histories. Most pressing is
an algorithm to determine what constitutes an edit war, vandalism or any
other type of "noise" in the system if one's measuring "substantive" edits.
(This is hard - even the "I'll know it when I see it" method is problematic,
as evidenced by the recent dispute with and departure of RickK.) Much of the
research myself, Jakob Voss, Cathy Ma and others do depend on analyzing edit
histories and drawing conclusions about article quality. So far, none of the
research I've seen has "factored out" the effect of edit wars and vandalism.
2. Classifying types of edits, using diffs or edit summaries. There is a
desire to qualitative
lexical (spelling, punctuation), factual (numbers, dates), organizational
(rearranging), prose (style, tense change), etc. What are the best practices
in detecting and classifying these?
3. Comparative approaches to reserach and modelling article "clusters."
Last year, while comparing entries in a print encyclopedia against the
categories in Wikipedia, the toughest part was trying to match up the
taxonomical classifications, and the variation in breakdown into subtopics.
How are people dealing with this mapping?
Please add to the list, and I will help assemble.
-Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
Hello
Best is to forward it to Wikipedia-l
http://www.unipark.de/uc/wikipedia/
Cheers
Ant
--- Joachim Schroer
<schroer(a)psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de> wrote:
> Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 15:55:42 +0200
> From: Joachim Schroer
> <schroer(a)psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de>
> To: wiki-research-l(a)Wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Announcement: Survey
> study on the motivation of contributors to Wikipedi
>
> Dear all,
>
> we're a team of organizational psychologists at the
> University of
> Wuerzburg (Germany), and at the moment we're
> conducting a survey study
> on the motivation of contributors to Wikipedia.
>
> The study is available at:
> <http://www.unipark.de/uc/wikipedia/>
>
> Our project page is here:
>
<www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/research/wikipedia.php?lang=en>
>
> I have already sent the announcement to the WikiEN
> list:
>
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-July/026281.html>
>
> The questionnaire is in English, but participants
> from other Wikipedias
> are of course invited to take part as well. Do you
> have ideas how to
> make the survey known in other projects?
>
> We'd also be happy...
> - if you could forward this link to other people who
> might be
> interested, but do not read the mailing lists, and
> - if you might put up links to our survey where they
> fit.
>
> Thank you!
> Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
>
> Joachim Schroer
>
> --
> Joachim Schroer, Dipl.-Psych.
> University of Wuerzburg
> Department of Psychology II, Industrial and
> Organizational Psychology
> Roentgenring 10
> 97070 Wuerzburg
> Germany
>
> Phone: +49 931 31 6062
> Fax: +49 931 31 6063
>
http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/staff/schroer.php
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l(a)Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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Dear all,
we're a team of organizational psychologists at the University of
Wuerzburg (Germany), and at the moment we're conducting a survey study
on the motivation of contributors to Wikipedia.
The study is available at:
<http://www.unipark.de/uc/wikipedia/>
Our project page is here:
<www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/research/wikipedia.php?lang=en>
I have already sent the announcement to the WikiEN list:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-July/026281.html>
The questionnaire is in English, but participants from other Wikipedias
are of course invited to take part as well. Do you have ideas how to
make the survey known in other projects?
We'd also be happy...
- if you could forward this link to other people who might be
interested, but do not read the mailing lists, and
- if you might put up links to our survey where they fit.
Thank you!
Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
Joachim Schroer
--
Joachim Schroer, Dipl.-Psych.
University of Wuerzburg
Department of Psychology II, Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Roentgenring 10
97070 Wuerzburg
Germany
Phone: +49 931 31 6062
Fax: +49 931 31 6063
http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/staff/schroer.php
[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/mailman-msgid?showcomments=yes
As someone who is interested in and cites email conversations, the opacity
of the mailman interface -- or the lack of my understanding -- is a pain. I
was spoiled by the W3C's system [1] where each email had a header with a
URL to its place in the archive, which corresponded in some way to the
msg-id! When processing comments on a spec, or citing conversations, its
very handy to be able to link to a persistent Web representation of an
email.
In writing about Wikipedia discourse I'm stuck with using the message-id if
I happen to have that email in a mbox, or a URL if I happen to have a Web
page, but from one I can not easily get the other, and I'm not confident
that the URL will be stable in any case. (For example, will [2] always
correspond to the message with the message-id "42BEC0EF.6070906(a)web.de"?)
Without a guarantee of stability, I suppose its best to use msg-id in citing
WP discourse, but that makes finding that message problematic for the
reader. I'd provide a hint if I could somehow obtain it myself, but the
HTML page for a message in the archive has no indicatation of the msg-id.
And even if I have the msg-id, I can't easily find the corresponding
archive URL. Before sending this message, I thought there would be a search
interface and I could write a script, but there doesn't appear to be one,
and it doesn't work in Google (e.g., [3]).
What to do??
[1] http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Devel
[2] http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-June/040600.html
[3]
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=42BEC0EF.6070906%40web.de&num=10&hl=en&ie…
]]
--
Regards, http://reagle.org/joseph/
Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E