Yearly Archives: 2010

Tidbits from Wikipedia presentation at Wikysym by Andrew Lih “What Hath Wikipedia Wrought: Crowds Remaking the News”

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The presentation (embedded below) consists of 148 slides. Below I selected few interesting ones.

Slide 42
• Wikitravel: only 5% of those who press “edit” actually save
• Wikipedia: 1/5 to 2/5
• WikiHow: 30% with guided editing
• Wikia: WYSIWYG editor >> 50%
Sources: Jack Herrick, WikiHow; Erik Zachte, Wikimedia Foundation

Slide 91:
An experiment by The Guardian on crowdsourcing journalism.
The Guardian obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
How do you catch up? If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.
Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

What Hath Wikipedia Wrought? Crowds remaking the news

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Differences in Wikipedia pages about “Vietnam War” (English vs Vietnamese)

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Just a quick play: below I embedded the page about Vietnam war from English Wikipedia and the translation in English of the page about Vietnam war from Vietnamese Wikipedia. (click here to open just the page embedding the 2 pages).

Would be interesting to automatically check the differences in how different communities (in this case defined by the language) represent the same concepts.
For example the beginning of the article from the Vietnamese wikipedia (automatically translated) says: In Vietnam, newspapers still use the name of resistance against American for just this war, [9] as well as to distinguish it from other wars that happened in Vietnam when anti- French , anti- Japanese , anti- Mongolia , against China. Some people [10] feels not name the U.S. invasions of neutrality by the war also reflects elements of a civil war; [10] that some other name for the Vietnam War reflected the views of West rather than the people living in Vietnam. [10] The name of this war is still a matter of controversy. But now scholars in and outside Vietnam have gradually accepted the name “Vietnam War” because of its international nature.

from English Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org 		from Vietnamese Wikipedia (translated in English with Google)

http://vi.wikipedia.org

Wikimania 2010 Trivia Night: Smurfs and communism or Vampire pumpkins and watermelons or WP:WHAT??

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At Wikimania 2010, there was a Trivia Night (see the slides).
You had to team with at most 3 other people. And you get +1 point for each right answer.
Some of the question were:
* Is this a Wikipedia article?
* [[The Smurfs and communism]]
* [[Exploding head syndrome]]
* [[Martian language]]
* [[Death from laughing]]
* [[AOL disk collecting]]
* [[Lawn mower racing]]
* [[[[Vampire pumpkins and watermelons]].
Great simple idea for warming up the conference in a light way. Should have been fun ;)

Papers about Wikipedia at CSCW 2010

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February report of few papers about Wikipedia at CSCW conference by David Karger at Haystack Blog, MIT CSAIL Research.
The paper briefly reviewed are
* Socialization Tactics in Wikipedia and their Effects, by Choi, Alexander, Kraut and Levine: studied how participants early experiences of Wikipedia—whether they were invited or began editing on their own; whether their work was ignored, admired, or critiqued; what kind of advice they received—affected users later participation in and contributions to Wikipedia.
* The work of sustaining order in Wikipedia: The banning of a vandal by Geiger and Ribes
* Readers are Not Free-Riders: Reading as a Form of Participation on Wikipedia, by Antin and Cheshire: the more you know about wikipedia (sampled with a survey), the more you participate
* Egalitarians at the Gate: One-Sided Gatekeeping Practices in Participatory Social Media, by Keegan and Gergle: which breaking news stories are featured on the front page? They studied whether this decision is made in an egalitarian fashion or whether some individuals have significantly more power. Most interestingly, they found that certain ‘elite users’ who participate in the discussion to an unusually high degree do have inordinate power to “spike” stories, preventing them from appearing, but do not seem to have power to push stories they like into appearance.
* Beyond Wikipedia: Coordination and Conflict in Online Production Groups by Kittur and Kraut. Interestingly they studied Wikia.com, a service hosting over 6000 distinct wikis all running on the same Mediawiki platform as Wikipedia. The uniformity of implementation meant that it could be ruled out as a source of different behaviors in different wikis.

First day at Sunbelt

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The first day of Sunbelt is finished: it was very hot … meaning there were some problems with conditioning air not working ;)
I met some cool people: in particular
(1) Mathieu Bastian of Gephi, great open source program for visualization of networks,
(2) Jure Leskovec of Stanford, hands-down best talk up to now, who spoke about “Predicting Positive and Negative Links in Online Social Networks”, work on Wikipedia, Slashdot and Epinions signed social networks (they even cited me in the paper and used the Epinions trust network I made available time ago on Trustlet.org!),
(3) Filippo Menczer of Indiana University, whose great Scholarometer widget I recently embedded on my blog and who is doing many different great works.

Some people are using the hashtag #sunbelt on Twitter, you might enjoy posts tagged as #sunbelt as made visible by visibletweets (iframed below)

Last point, I’m at Sunbelt with my colleagues in the SoNet group, Michela Ferron and Asta Zelenkauskaite. Tomorrow we will present two recent works: one about
social networks in Wikipedia, the other about social capital and enterprise2.0 platform usage.

Now back to finish the slides …

My invited talk at Future Networked Technologies event

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Few days ago I gave an invited talk at the the Future Networked Technologies event in Graz.
It was organized by FIT-IT, the largest Austrian national public funding programme for research in information technology, for the opening of competitive calls for collaborative research projects, in 3 areas: Semantic Systems and Services, Trust in IT Systems and Visual Computing.

It was not an easy task being inspirational for many different researchers coming from these 3 different backgrounds.
I talked about what I did during my PhD Thesis (work on trust metrics and trust-aware recommender systems), about what we are doing in my research group SoNet (research on social networks in Wikipedia and about Enterprise2.0) and a bit about my research institute, FBK. I used the research lines I work(ed) on as motivating examples for what I advocated today research should be: interoperable on the open web and aimed at creating services for real users.
Examples I pointed at toward the end (all of them related to Semantic Systems and services” call) were: DBpedia, Microformats, RDFa, LinkedData.

The slides of my talk are embedded below:

Invited talk at Future Networked Technologies / FIT-IT research calls opening Graz, Austria – June 9th, 2010

View more presentations from Paolo Massa.

The meeting was very interesting. There were around 40 or 50 researchers from Austria. I got a chance to talk with some of them after my talk and got interesting feedback and suggestions. I hope I gave them some food for thought.
Among the projects I discovered (funded in the past by FIT-IT) I particularly liked:
* DYONIPOS – DYnamic ONtology based Integrated Process OptimiSation (which is more impressive than the website would make you imagine, and more importantly it was used and evaluated empirically by the Austrian Ministry of Finance).
* Caleydo, an innovative Visualization Framework for Gene Expression Data in its Biological Context (below a demo of it).

What is the status of Wikinews?

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Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, just as the more known Wikipedia. The site works through collaborative journalism.
Some people claimed it failed in its attempt but I was not able to find a report about this (evolution over the years, quantity of editors involved, news produced, … and more interestingly health and diversity of the active community).
Ironically, the only relevant information I found is in a Knol, the Google alternative to Wikipedia.

Wikinews has been in existence for several years now, and yet the English-language version has only 15,000 articles. Considering that Wikipedia has already surpassed three million articles, that is a sad testimony to the effort to keep Wikinews alive. Wikinews for the most part merely regurgitates news already covered elsewhere, and no other news outlet, to my knowledge, quotes Wikinews. Wikinews never fulfilled it’s objective, and should be allowed to die a graceful death.

In addition to that, Wikinews has been allowed to be taken over by a clique of individuals pushing a power play to silence any opposition, either to their own point-of-view or the point-of-view of their e-friends. That is anathema to any free society project. Whenever one group uses power to punish opposition, and that opposition has no actual and effective recourse (there is no appeal process), than the project must be shut down. When a conflict occurs and it is deemed useful to dole out punishment of any sort, the entire conflict must be reviewed and all sides punished in an equitable fashion. Wikipedia learned this rule, only after creating thousands of vandals, some of which are still going strong.

Do you have any experience with WikiNews?

Using the Web to do Social Science: ICML 2010 Keynote by Duncan Watts

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Duncan Watts is principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group.

Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, Duncan proposes that the ability to study truly ‘social’ dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science. To illustrate this, he will describe four examples of research that would have been extremely difficult, or even impossible, to perform just a decade ago:
* Using email exchange to track social networks evolving in time
* Using a web-based experiment to study the collective consequences of social influence on decision making
* Using a social networking site to study the difference between perceived and actual homogeneity of attitudes among friends
* Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to study the incentives underlying ‘crowd sourcing’

Read the interesting report of the talk by Fitzgerald Steele. (via Avesao)

“The Secret Powers of Time”: how to present effectively! And on the absense of future tense in Sicilian dialect…

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Beside the content (which is interesting, he has a message), the way of presenting it is fabulous!!! I want to do something like that as well in the future!

An interesting tidbit of information. In the talk Professor Philip Zimbardo mention that in the Sicilian dialect (Sicily in the southern part of Italy) there is no verb tense for future! I checked quickly and what I got was a discussion in the Sicilian Wikipedia pointing to a web site that is now down. Being warned about the source, below you can find the translation in English, I modified some parts but over all Google Translate did a great job. Enjoy!
“THE FUTURE. In Sicilian dialect is missing the future tense of verbs and any statement about future action is constructed with present tense and the word becomes preceded by an adverb of time (eg: Duman vegnu, Tomorrow I come). Paul Messina explains: As you can understand (almost philosophically) this anomaly? Is the starting point for a link between language and culture, ways of being and thinking. This is the historical consciousness of Heideggerian being-here to produce a continuous reduction of the future to present, of ‘hic et nunc’ (‘here and now’) and this occurs having full possession of the past definitely conquered now. Sicilians are masters of time or, to put it in Tomasi di Lampedusa word, are Gods. But to be (or to be believed to be) masters of time can mean mentally dominate life and death, to be sure of its inviolability only in the present, one that appropriates the future time to prevent death, unavoidable shadow existence. What counts is the present. Being and becoming, in short, blend or merge themselves in the metaphysics anxiety”.