Submissions/Wikipedia - One Wheel in Many Social Machines

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 5054

Title of the submission: Wikipedia - One Wheel in Many Social Machines

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): presentation and discussion

Author of the submission: Markus Luczak-Roesch (MLuczak), Ramine Tinati, Elena Simperl

E-mail address: m.luczak-rosch@soton.ac.uk

Username: User:MLuczak

Country of origin: United Kingdom

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): University of Southampton

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

In this talk we are pitching the idea to evolve Wikipedia towards a central instance allowing for taking the pulse of the Web by real-time analytics as a built-in function, flanking the outstanding amount of free textual knowledge by a new kind of procedural knowledge represented in form of paths to Web contents.

Wikipedia pages are very often accessed and interlinked by consumers to attain an initial overview around a particular topic of interest or a trending matter. Furthermore, its consumption makes Wikipedia being one part of many human-created and technology mediated cross-system information flows, which one can see as abstract Social Machines – “processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration”.

We will found our proposal by presenting examples of how content and community dynamics around Wikipedia but also citizen science projects can be exploited for this purpose. In one example we will show how trending topics can be mined based on page views and how this compares to Google Trends in terms of timeliness. A second approach is measuring information diffusion in different language versions of Wikipedia and showing cross lingual as well as cross-cultural differences. Finally, a broad study of the Zooniverse citizen science platform informs about emergent and self-organised coordination of collaborative work by using hashtags and links.

Our goal is to bring up and discuss the idea to establish article analytics and sharing of anonymized usage data as core functionalities of Wikipedia. We will propose the notion of an analytics tab next to the Talk tab, which will be fed by the results of these analytics and allows the user to follow the paths to and from Wikipedia contents. This will turn Wikipedia from a passive content contributor into an active social flow component, practically supporting information diffusion on Web-scale.

Track

Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: yes

Slides or further information (optional)

SOCIAM is the worlds largest current research project studying the theory and practice of Social Machines, essentially aiming at advancing our understanding of existing Social Machines and investigating principles and technologies for developing sustainable new ones. More information are available at http://sociam.org

Special requests

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

Daniel Mietchen (talk) 19:47, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
the wub "?!" 23:48, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Micru (talk) 14:19, 15 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Add your username here.