Browsing by Subject "Wikis"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Bike, Bus, and Beyond: Extending Cyclopath to Enable Multi- Modal Routing
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2013-07) Terveen, Loren
    This project addressed several MnDOT critical issues and strategic directions: easing congestion and improving mobility by making multi-modal transit options more easily accessible. It did so by extending the Cyclopath bicycle route-finding system to support multi-modal routes that combine cycling and transit. This required extensions to the route-finding algorithm – to combine biking and transit appropriately – and user interface – to let users express modal preferences and enhance the visual presentation of routes, e.g., to mark mode shifts. We used the Graphserver open-source software to as the routing engine; by building on existing software, we reduced development effort. We conducted interviews with a number of multimodal transit users to guide the design of the user interface.
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    Consumers, editors, and power editors at work: diversity of users in Online peer production communities
    (2014-09) Panciera, Katherine Anne
    Many people rely on open collaboration projects to run their computer (Linux), browse the web (Mozilla Firefox), and get information (Wikipedia). Open content web sites are peer production communities which depend on users to produce content. In this thesis, we analyze three types of users in peer production communities: consumers, contributors, and core contributors. Consumers don't edit or add content while contributors add some content. Core contributors edit or contribute much more content than others on the site. The three types of users each serve a different role in the community, receive different benefits from the community, and are important to the survival of a community.We look at users in two communities: Wikipedia and Cyclopath. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known peer production community. The majority of the work in this dissertation is from Cyclopath, a geowiki for bicyclists developed by GroupLens. Since we built Cyclopath, we have access to data that allowed us to delve much deeper into the divide between the three types of users. First, we wanted to understand what the quantitative differences between core contributors and contributors were. On Wikipedia and Cyclopath, core contributors start editing more intensely from their first day on the site. On Cyclopath we were able to look at pre-registration activity and found equivocal evidence for "educational lurking". Building on this quantitative analysis, we turned to qualitative questions. By surveying and interviewing Cyclopath users, we learned what motivates them to participate and what benefits they derive from participating. While consumers and contributors both benefited by receiving routes, contributors were more likely to say they registered to edit. (Registration was not required to edit.) We also found that the Cyclopath core contributors aren't the most dedicated bicyclists, but they are committed to the values of open content. By providing a holistic view of users on Cyclopath and by looking at Wikipedia editors quantitatively, we discovered opportunities for new forms of participation, such as an outlet for subjective comments and annotations, as well a key to motivating people to contributing objective information, highlighting flaws and easy fixes in the system.
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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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    Understanding and increasing social production online
    (2013-09) Masli, Mikhil
    Social production is a phenomenon that lets a large number of people work together to produce common resources. The advent of the Internet has enabled this phenomenon to scale to large proportions, with participants coming from a wide variety of places and demographics. Many such communities have become a part and parcel of our daily lives today. For example, for reference, we turn to the collaboratively-built encyclopedia Wikipedia, and for getting our questions answered, we turn to Q&A sites such as Yahoo! Answers. The last few years have seen this phenomenon merge ways with advancements in online mapping technologies, giving rise to a new class of applications that may be termed geographic social production communities. Resources such as OpenStreetMap are becoming increasingly popular and even Google Maps has added a feature called MapMaker to help crowd-source geographic data. From a human-computer interaction and social computing perspective, understanding how social production happens in such communities and findings ways to increase and improve it are both important and interesting research topics. Accordingly, this dissertation makes contributions in both these directions. While the research and findings of this dissertation are particularly applicable to geographic social production communities, they can be extended to other applications as well. We first study how contributors in Cyclopath—a geographic social production community—participate by analyzing behavioral log data using visualization and statistical methods. Specifically, we investigate how Cyclopath contributors specialized in the tasks they choose to do. We find evidence for specialization by work type: Most users edit a single type of map feature, such as points of interest or roads and trails. We also see a user life-cycle effect: as users gain experience, they specialize in editing roads and trails. Our findings suggest more effective ways to organize social production interfaces, compose units of work, and match them to users who want to help. However, matching tasks to people is, at its core, dependent on compliance with requests to contribute on the part of the users. Therefore, as a next step, we investigate into techniques that may help us increase the chances of this happening. Social psychology offers several theories of potential use for designing techniques to increase user contributions to online communities. Some of these techniques follow the "compliance without pressure" approach, where users are led to comply with a request without being subjected to any obvious external pressure. We evaluate two such techniques—foot-in-the-door and low-ball—in the context of Cyclopath and report that while both techniques succeeded, low-ball elicited more work than foot-in-the-door. However, we find that these effects were one-shot and contribution levels drop back to pre-request levels soon after. We also find that while these techniques have the potential to succeed in the short term, they could cause long-term harm, because users may feel manipulated and lower their sense of belonging to the community. We believe that one of the reasons for this was the inherent unnaturalness in the process: users were being coerced to contribute, i.e., do something that they typically do not. Therefore, as a next step, we explore ways of eliciting contributions by leveraging natural processes. One such natural process is information consumption. Accordingly, we explore the feasibility of using the act of consuming information as a gateway to contributing information; specifically, we investigate semi-automated means to extract useful information from standard types of explicit user feedback. We analyze naturally occurring textual route feedback in Cyclopath, finding that the feedback was rich in information such as bikeability ratings, tags and notes that are useful to improve the system's route finding and navigational assistance capabilities. We also present a technique to extract such information by engaging users in dialogue immediately after they obtain a route. Finally, we explore the utility of online social production through the lens of an application that has not been well explored before: how citizen-driven online social production helps the government activity of transportation planning. We described the design of a novel route analysis tool based on Cyclopath to assist transportation planners to make better planning decisions. We highlight the advantages of using a online social production system over other, similar ones through a real-life usage scenario. We believe that the results and ideas in this dissertation are applicable to a broad class of online social production systems.