Browsing by Subject "Wikipedia"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Collaborative curation in social production communities.
    (2012-08) Lam, Shyong (Tony) K.
    The use of social production communities (SPCs) has become a common approach for building information repositories such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and YouTube. In these systems, communities of users collaborate to produce a shared repository of information. We define collaborative curation as the tasks performed by these communities, and the processes, workflows, and policies that guide how users work together. This thesis seeks to study the implications of different curation processes, and the challenges that SPCs face in constructing information repositories. Our goal is to better understand the growth and evolution of SPC information repositories so that we can inform the design of SPCs. The first part of this thesis focuses on collaborative curation practices at a high level to learn about the design space of curation mechanisms and the impact that different mechanisms have on the evolution of SPCs. We begin with an analysis ofWikipedia’s curation practices, studying how Wikipedia’s editors decide which articles merit inclusion in the encyclopedia, and how the encyclopedia has grown over the years. We then conduct a user study using the MovieLens recommender system to compare two typical curation mechanisms – a wiki-like process, and a social voting process – in how they affect the growth of MovieLens’ movie database. In the second part of this thesis, our focus shifts to challenges that SPCs face in collaborative curation. We start by looking at how skews in group composition can influence collaborative curation. SPCs typically rely on the efforts of self-formed and self-organized volunteer groups. Such groups may differ from the larger user community or from the general populace on multiple dimensions, including demographics, attitudes, and experience. We conduct two studies to study these differences in the context of Wikipedia. At the small-scale level, we examine how composition skews in small working groups can affect curation decision quality; at the large-scale level, we explore an apparent gender disparity amongst Wikipedia’s community of editors. We close with an analysis of a type of malicious deviant behavior where users submit false data to an SPC in an attempt to manipulate choices made by fellow users.
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    Maintaining the efficiency of open production systems at scale: a case study of Wikipedia
    (2013-12) Halfaker, Aaron
    This dissertation represents an exploration of the function and failures of critical subsystems in open production communities with Wikipedia as a case study. Specifically, I explore the nature of rejection via Wikipedia's informal, post-hoc quality control system and identify a consistent ownership bias that undermines Wikipedia's ethos of openness. I also quantify an inherent trade-off between the speed and efficiency of quality control in Wikipedia and the motivation of rejected contributors -- especially new editors. I then proceed to show how Wikipedia's shifting focus on quality control and formal process has led to a dramatic decline in the rate of retention of desirable new editors that threatens the long-term viability of the project.In light of these results, I present studies of two experimental software systems intended to explore potential solutions to this steady decrease in participation. First I draw on social learning theory to evaluate the effectiveness of a new mode of peripheral participation through reader-submitted feedback. I experimentally demonstrate effective strategies for increasing the rate of contributions without decreasing quality and argue for efficient moderation support in order to make quality control worth volunteer time spent away from editing the encyclopedia. Next, I describe the design and three month field study of a new intelligent software system intended to both efficiently support socialization practices in Wikipedia and bring visibility to the systemic problems that lead to declining newcomer retention. I show evidence that the system works in both regards: critical newcomer socialization activities are made dramatically more efficient and users of the system reflect openly on the breakdowns in Wikipedia's quality control processes.This work has already had impact within the Wikipedia community and in directing the strategy employed by the Wikimedia Foundation in designing and evaluating new software for Wikipedia editors.
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    The Production and Consumption of Quality Content in Peer Production Communities
    (2016-12) Warncke-Wang, Morten
    Over the past 25 years, commons-based peer production [Ben02] has become a vital part of the information technology landscape. There are successful projects in different areas such as open source software (e.g. Apache and Firefox), encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia), and map data (e.g. OpenStreetMap). A common theme in all these communities is that they are mainly volunteer-driven and that contributors are able to self-select what they want to work on. Studies on contributor motivation in peer production have found “fun” and “appropriate challenges” to be strong factors [Nov07; LW05], both associated with the sensation of vital engagement often referred to as “flow” [NC03]. Peer production contributors also often refer to altruism, the desire to be helpful to others, as a motivating factor [BH13]. To what extent does this bottom-up, interest-driven, volunteer-based content production paradigm meet the needs of consumers of this content? This thesis presents our work on improving our understanding of how peer production communities produce quality content and whether said quality content is produced in areas where there is demand for it. We study this from three perspectives and make contributions as follows: we investigate what textual features describe content quality in Wikipedia and develop a high-performance prediction model solely based on features contributors can easily improve (so called “actionable features”); we apply a coherent framework for describing and evaluating quality improvement projects in order to discover factors associated with the success and failure of these types of projects; we introduce an analytical framework that allows is to identify the misalignment between supply of and demand for quality content in peer production communities and measure the impact this has on a community’s audience. The research presented in this thesis provides us with a deeper understanding of quality content in peer production communities. These communities have created software, encyclopedic content, and maps that in many ways improve our everyday lives as well as those of millions of others. At the same time we have identified areas where there is a shortage of quality content and discussed future work that can help reduce this problem. This thesis thus lays the foundation upon which we can build improved communities and positively impact a large part of the world’s population.
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    Textual curators and writing machines: authorial agency in encyclopedias, print to digital.
    (2009-07) Kennedy, Krista A.
    Wikipedia is often discussed as the first of its kind: the first massively collaborative, Web-based encyclopedia that belongs to the public domain. While it’s true that wiki technology enables large-scale, distributed collaborations in revolutionary ways, the concept of a collaborative encyclopedia is not new, and neither is the idea that private ownership might not apply to such documents. More than 275 years ago, in the preface to the 1728 edition of his Cyclopædia, Ephraim Chambers mused on the intensely collaborative nature of the volumes he was about to publish. His thoughts were remarkably similar to contemporary intellectual property arguments for Wikipedia, and while the composition processes involved in producing these texts are influenced by the available technologies, they are also unexpectedly similar. This dissertation examines issues of authorial agency in these two texts and shows that the “Author Construct” is not static across eras, genres, or textual technologies. In contrast to traditional considerations of the poetic author, the encyclopedic author demonstrates a different form of authorial agency that operates within strict genre conventions and does not place a premium on originality. This and related variations challenge contemporary ideas concerning the divide between print and digital authorship as well as the notion that new media intellectual property arguments are without historical precedent.