On Wikimedia projects, audio and video content has traditionally taken a backseat relative to text and static images (however, changes are underway). Conversely, more and more scholarly publications come with audio and video files, though these are — a legacy from the print era — typically relegated to the “supplementary material” rather than embedded next to the relevant text passages. And a rising number of these publications are Open Access, i.e. freely available under Creative Commons licenses that allow for the materials to be reused in other contexts.

Why not enrich thematically related Wikimedia pages with such multimedia files? That’s where the Open Access Media Importer (OAMI) comes in. It makes scientific video and audio clips accessible to the Wikimedia community and a broader public audience. The OAMI is an open-source program (or ‘bot’) that crawls PubMed Central — a full-text database of over 3 million biomedical research articles — and extracts multimedia files from those publications in the database that are available under Wikimedia-compatible licenses.

Such reuse-friendly terms are the key ingredient to making scholarly materials useful beyond the article in which they have originally been published. However, OAMI aims to make this material even more useful by making it accessible:

• in places where people actually look for them (Wikimedia platforms are a prime example),
• in one coherent format (in our case Ogg Vorbis/Theora, which isn’t encumbered by patent restrictions), and
• in a way that allows for collaborative annotation with relevant metadata. This makes it a lot easier to browse and search the media files.

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This post is available in 2 languages:

português  • English

In English

The Wiki Research Hackathon coming to a place near you on November 9, 2013.

Last summer at Wikimania in Hong Kong, the annual global Wikimedia conference, we (a group of Wikipedia researchers) discussed how we could make wiki research more impactful. In our work in academia and on Wikimedia projects, we saw a host of missed opportunities to share ideas, hypotheses, code, and research methods. We set out to create a space to bring researchers together with Wikipedians and facilitate problem solving, discovery and innovation with the use of open data and open source tools. Labs² (L2) aims to build this space, by providing infrastructure and venues for collaborative wiki research.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the inaugural Wiki Research Hackathon – a global event hosted by Wikimedia Foundation researchers, academic researchers and Wikipedians from around the world on Saturday, November 9, 2013.

What

This hackathon is an opportunity for anyone interested in research on wikis, Wikipedia, and open collaboration to meet, share ideas, and work together. It is targeted at Wikipedia editors, students, researchers, coders and anyone interested in designing new tools, statistics and data visualization, and producing new knowledge about Wikimedia projects and their communities.

The goal of this event is to:

• share knowledge about research tools and datasets (and how to use them)
• ask burning research questions (and learn how to answer them)
• get involved in ongoing research projects (or start new ones)
• design new data-driven apps and tools (or hack existing ones)

Where

(Locations are approximate)

This hackathon will be held both as a series of local meetups (Perth, Mannheim, Oxford, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.) and virtual meetups (Asia/Oceania, Europe/Africa & The Americas) for those who can’t make it to the local events. An IRC channel (#wikimedia-labs^connect) and a Google Hangout open throughout the day will allow attendees to connect online.

How

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Vol: 3 • Issue: 9 • September 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Automatic detection of “infiltrating” Wikipedia admins; Wiki, or ‘pedia?

With contributions by: Brian Keegan, Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Halfaker, Jonathan Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Wiki, or ‘pedia? The genre and values of Wikipedia compared with other encyclopedias

Wikipedia and Encyclopaedism: A Genre Analysis of Epistemological Values^[1] is a new Masters’ Thesis that analyzes the values that influenced how knowledge is presented on Wikipedia, in comparison with other encyclopedias that have been created throughout history. The author uses genre analysis to compare the epistemological values that are represented in the kind of knowledge that different encyclopedias present and in the way they present that knowledge. The author first conducts a literature review to compare the epistemology of two genres: wikis and encyclopedias. The wiki epistemology is composed of six values: self-identification, collaboration, co-construction, cooperation, trust in the community, and constructionism. By contrast, the values of major current and historical encyclopedias—such as Diderot’s Encyclopedia, Pliny’s Natural History, and the Encyclopædia Britannica—prioritize trust in experts, authority, and consistency.

Despite being based on different, and even somewhat contradictory, value systems, the purpose of Wikipedia and the way it presents knowledge are shown to be similar to other works in the encyclopedia genre. The author analyzes the frequency of common words in section headings of 25 heavily edited English Wikipedia articles that had a corresponding article in Britannica. He compares the evolution of section headings within these Wikipedia articles and multiple editions of Britannica, and shows that the gradual process by which a Wikipedia article becomes more structured through the addition and alteration of headings is similar to the process for Britannica articles, which also tend to become longer and more formally structured over subsequent editions. This thesis presents some interesting parallels between the way articles are developed within Wikipedia and other encyclopedias, despite vastly different timescales and some differing underlying values. It also offers an engaging, in-depth discussion of the concept of genre, the purpose of the encyclopedia genre, and the history of several major historical encyclopedias.

Identifying trending topics of yesteryear

In a paper titled “Temporal Wikipedia search by edits and linkage”^[2], the authors develop a method to identify Wikipedia articles associated with topics around a date based on changes the length of the article as well as patterns of the other articles to which it links. This paper expands on prior work in temporal information retrieval and anomaly detection and uses modifications to the HITS and PageRank to return a list of the most relevant documents for a topic on a date. This work has implications for not only using Wikipedia data to identify trending topics, but also to retrospectively identify trending topics. A downloadable Java client allows test searches (for the months of September and October 2011) and the display of the resulting page networks.

Automatic detection of “infiltrating” Wikipedia admins

A paper titled “Manipulation Among the Arbiters of Collective Intelligence: How Wikipedia Administrators Mold Public Opinion”^[3], to be presented at next month’s ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), makes a rather serious claim: “We find a surprisingly large number of editors who change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status.” (more…)

Vol: 3 • Issue: 8 • August 2013 [contribute] [archives]

WikiSym 2013 retrospective

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, Brian Keegan, Dario Taraborelli, Tilman Bayer

WikiSym 2013

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

98 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 published with ACM, now under its new open access policy.

Full papers

• Despite policy, only just over half of Wikipedia sources are secondary: “Getting to the Source: Where does Wikipedia Get Its Information From”^[1] presents an overall statistics on the sources referred to in English Wikipedia articles to answer this question. The initial seed of source tags is constructed by analysing 30 randomly selected articles, and then all articles in Wikipedia as of May 2012 have been probed to find and classify the references. Some 67 million citations for 3.5 million articles have been found. The classification is performed on a random selection of 500 citations and by two human coders. More than 30% of the citations were classified as primary sources, around 53% as secondary, and around 13% as tertiary. After discussing type, creator, and publisher of the references as well as large scale domain analysis and persistence in time, the paper concludes: “Wikipedia’s content is ultimately driven by the sources from which that content comes. … Although secondary sources are considered by policy to be the most desirable type, we demonstrate that nearly half of all citations are either primary or tertiary sources, with primary sources making up approximately one-third of all citations.”

• Conflict on Wikipedia as “generative friction”: (more…)

Vol: 3 • Issue: 7 • July 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Napoleon, Michael Jackson and Srebrenica across cultures, 90% of Wikipedia better than Britannica, WikiSym preview

With contributions by: Taha Yasseri, Han-Teng Liao, Piotr Konieczny, Jonathan Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Multilingual ranking analysis: Napoleon and Michael Jackson as Wikipedia’s “global heroes”

An ArXiv preprint titled “Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles”^[1], authored by a group of physicists from France, examines the Wikipedia articles on individuals and their position in the hyperlink network of the articles in each Wikipedia language edition. There are 9 language editions studied. The authors try to locate the most “important” individuals (“heroes”) in each language edition by calculating two different page rank scores: PageRank and CheiRank. After making the lists of individuals with highest ranks in each language edition (with 30 individuals in each list), overlaps between lists are investigated and local and global “heroes” are introduced. The lists of “global heroes” are topped by Napoleon for PageRank, and Michael Jackson for 2DRank. It is shown that both local and global heroes exist and while global heroes gain their central position in the network due to links from multiple other central nodes, local heroes are mostly notable because of the large number of links directly pointing to them. Finally, based on the nationality (language of origin) of the highly ranked individual, a network of languages is constructed and the position of each language in this network is analysed by calculating rank scores. The authors also analyzed the activities of those important individuals, and have found politicians and scientists to be quite often among the most important ones.

Art: Image-sharing relationship between 154 language versions of Wikipedia (from the DMI Summer School 2013)

Wikipedia as Cultural Reference: Srebrenica Massacre, Art and Menstruation

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Does it matter that women are mostly not editing the most important information resource in our world? Does it matter that one of the most important artifacts in human history tends to be written mostly by males? […] That seems to me really important, and the question for this community, for people with our skills, is: what can we do about it? We know how to redesign socio-technical communities so that they work differently: what would be a Wikipedia that was more welcoming, that worked better for women?

— John Riedl, Community, Cooperation, and Conflict in Wikipedia, talk at UC Irvine, March 2, 2012

John Riedl in 2010

Last year, at a lecture given at UC Irvine, computer scientist John Riedl urged students and researchers not to remain passive scholars of online collaboration, but to “design tools to directly change how the world works”. At the time when he gave this advice, John was already years into a long fight with cancer. He died this past Monday, leaving among his legacy one of the most important bodies of research on Wikipedia, and inspiring a generation of computer and social scientists to think of software design as a way to build better social systems.

With his students and collaborators at GroupLens Research – the group that he co-founded at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s – John made enormous contributions to our understanding of Wikipedia, studying among other things:

• How to recommend relevant work to Wikipedia editors (a project which resulted in the development of SuggestBot, a tool still widely used by our community, Cosley et al. 2007)
• The survival of individual contributions and the exposure of temporarily vandalized articles to readers (Priedhorsky et al. 2007)
• How article creation and article deletion have evolved over the years as a result of Wikipedia’s growth in topic coverage and policies (Lam and Riedl 2009)
• How Wikiprojects function, and how the diversity of their membership affects group productivity and member retention (Chen et al. 2010)
• The impact of quality control mechanisms (such as reverts) on new contributors, the quality of their work and their survival (Halfaker et al. 2011)
• Wikipedia’s gender gap, providing the first quantitative evidence of its impact on Wikipedia’s content, in a paper that received the “Best Full Paper” award at the WikiSym 2011 conference. Just last week, it was prominently cited in a strategy presentation here at the Wikimedia Foundation, by deputy director Erik Möller. (Lam et al. 2011)

John believed in Wikipedia research as a way to improve the quality and sustainability of our projects. And as a member of the Wikimedia Research Committee he also actively participated in discussions to develop policies and incentives to promote research of relevance to our volunteer communities.

He was an contributor to the English Wikipedia himself, with over 100 edits since signing up in 2005. In one of his last Wikipedia edits, John added well-cited information about promising new therapies to the article about Melanoma, the form of cancer from which he was suffering. One of his former students recalls that “he’s fought it as hard as he could, with as much knowledge as he could seek.” As with his own research, he shared this knowledge with others.

We wish to remember John for his relentless intellectual curiosity and extraordinary kindness and humanity, which made him an invaluable collaborator, mentor and friend. We owe to John much of what we know about our projects and we are immensely grateful to him for laying the groundwork for so many of us at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Dario Taraborelli
Senior Research Analyst

• Watch “Community, Cooperation and Conflict in Wikipedia” by John Riedl
• Read the obituary on the website of the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering
• Visit John’s homepage at GroupLens

Vol: 3 • Issue: 6 • June 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Most controversial Wikipedia topics, automatic detection of sockpuppets

With contributions by: Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Taha Yasseri and Tilman Bayer.

“The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: a multilingual and geographical analysis”

Map of Conflict in Spanish Wikipedia. Each dot represents a geolocated article. Size and colour of dots are corresponding to the controversy measure according to Sumi et al. (2001)^[1]. The map is taken from Yasseri, et al. (2013) ^[2].

A comparative work by T. Yasseri., A. Spoerri, M. Graham and J. Kertész on controversial topics in different language versions of Wikipedia has recently been posted on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) online scholarly archive ^[1]. The paper, which will appear as a chapter of an upcoming book titled “Global Wikipedia: International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration”, to be published by Scarecrow Press in 2014, and edited by Fichman P., and Hara N., looks at the 100 most controversial topics in 10 language versions of Wikipedia (results including 3 additional languages are reported in the blog of one of the authors), and tries to make sense of the similarities and differences in these lists. Several visualization methods are proposed, based on a flash-based tool developed by the authors, called CrystalView. Controversiality is measured using a scalar metric which takes into account the total volume of pairwise mutual reverts among all contributors to a page. This metric was proposed by Sumi et al. (2011)^[2], in a paper reviewed two years ago in this newsletter (“Edit wars and conflict metrics“). Topics related to politics, geographical locations, and religion are reported to be the most controversial across the board, and each language seems to feature specific, local controversies, which the authors further track down by grouping together languages with similar spheres of influences. Furthermore, the presence of latitude/longitude information (geocoordinates) in several of the Wikipedia articles in the sample analyzed in the study let the authors map the top controversial topics to a global world map, showing how each language features both local and global issues as the most heated topics of debate.

In summary, the study shows how valuable information about cross-cultural differences can be extracted from traces of Internet activity, though one obvious question is how the demographics of Wikipedia editors affect the representativeness of the results, an issue which the authors seem to be aware of, and which is probably going to play a role of increasing importance, as the field of cultural studies looks more and more at data generated by peer production communities.

The research has been intensely featured in the media, e.g., Huffington Post, Live Science, Wired.com, Zeit Online.

Non-virtual sockpuppets created by participants of RecentChangesCamp, as a humorous take on the sockpuppet phenomenon in online communities

Sockpuppet evidence from automated writing style analysis

“A Case Study of Sockpuppet Detection in Wikipedia”^[3], presented at a “Workshop on Language in Social Media” this month, describes an automated method to analyze the writing style of users for the purpose of detecting or confirming sockpuppets. The abuse of multiple accounts (also known as “multi-aliasing” or sybil attacks in other contexts) is described as “a prevalent problem in Wikipedia, there were close to 2,700 unique suspected cases reported in 2012.”

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Vol: 3 • Issue: 5 • May 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Motivations on the Persian Wikipedia; is science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than the English Wikipedia?

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Halfaker, Taha Yasseri, Daniel Mietchen and Tilman Bayer.

Motivations to contribute to the Persian Wikipedia

A chart adapted for use in the Persian article on human evolution.

An article in Library Review titled “Motivating and Discouraging Factors for Wikipedians: the Case Study of Persian Wikipedia”^[1] offers a much needed comparison of data from a population of editors outside the English Wikipedia. Most findings related to reasons people start and continue contributing confirm previous studies – important reasons for contributing include the desire to share knowledge and gaining recognition, and are reinforced by friendly interactions.

The authors find that “content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language” is a significant motivation too, something missing or seen as mostly irrelevant for contributors to the English Wikipedia. The authors also look at reasons for editors to become less active, an area that is not as well understood. Their findings confirm previous research – editors may leave because they find rules too confusing or other editors too unfriendly, or because they do not have enough time. They list some additional reasons not mentioned significantly in the existing literature, such as “issues with Persian script; sociocultural characteristics, e.g. lack of research-based teaching instruction and preference for ready-to-use information; strict rules against mass copying and copyright violation; small size of Persian Web content and a shortage of online Persian references.” The paper suffers from small sample size (interviews with 15 editors) and does not report statistics or rankings for some of the data, making it difficult, for example, to conclude or verify which motivations are more and less important. (Reviewer note: the reviewed pre-print copy did not include figures, which may contain the missing data.)

Science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than on the English Wikipedia?

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(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of the French Wikimedia chapter.)

Wikimedia France is pleased to announce the first winner of the Wikimedia France Research Award:

Vol: 3 • Issue: 4 • April 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Sentiment monitoring; Wikipedians and academics favor the same papers; UNESCO and systemic bias; How ideas flow on Wikiversity

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Oren Bochman, Taha Yasseri, Jonathan T. Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis

Traditional methods for detecting sentiment are less objective

Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report^[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.

The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.

“A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking”

A paper^[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. (more…)