Wild, Wild Wikis: A way forward (original) (raw)
Related papers
Quest for excellence in a wiki-based world
Professional Communication Conference, 2009. IPCC 2009. IEEE International , 2009
In an increasingly technological world, the Internet is often the primary source of information. Traditional encyclopedias, once the cornerstone of any worthy reference collection, have been replaced by online encyclopedias, many of which utilize open source software (OSS) to create and update content. One of the most popular and successful encyclopedias of this nature is Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is among the most popular Internet sites in the world. However, it is not without criticism. What are some features of Wikipedia? What are some of its strengths and weaknesses? And what have other wiki-based encyclopedias learned from Wikipedia that they have incorporated into their own websites in a quest for excellence? This paper answers these questions and uses Crawford's six information quality dimensions, 1) scope; 2) format; 3) uniqueness and authority; 4) accuracy; 5) currency; and 6) accessibility, to evaluate Wikipedia and three other online encyclopedias: Citizendium, Scholarpedia, and Medpedia. The latter three have managed to maintain the advantages of Wikipedia while minimizing its weaknesses.
Viable wikis: struggle for life in the wikisphere
2007
Abstract Wikis are collaborative platforms enabling collective elaboration of knowledge, the most famous and possibly the most successful thereof being the Wikipedia. There are currently plenty of other active open-access wikis, with varying success: some recruit many users and achieve sustainability, while others strive to attract sufficient active contributors, irrespective of the topic of the wiki.
Wikipedia Encyclopedia as a Manipulative Tool in Social Media
Problems of Information Society
The analysis of secured management technologies has become one of the factors of information security in the modern information society. The use of Wiki-projects as one of the social media tools in information impact is closely related to the wide application of informationcommunication instruments. The primary aim of the research is to study the social media phenomenon, the stance of wiki-environment as one of the social media tools in the society and its role in information impact. For this purpose, the notion of social media is explored and the fields encompassed by social media are specified. The problems associated with user content in wikienvironment are indicated and the essence of Creative Commons license is clarified. The main tendencies providing the information impact of wiki-environment are determined in the article.
2008
ABSTRACT One of the major issues facing socially-driven content and collaborative work on the Web (such as Wikipedia) is the lack of tools to measure at large scale the evolution of content (in terms of quality and quantity), to reduce the dropout rate of active contributors or to detect vandalism in a timely manner.
17 The Joys of Wiki Work: Craftsmanship, Flow and Self-externalization in a Digital Environment
2020
Public discussions on digital technology and the Internet tend generally to be framed in epochalist terms and to be rife with utopian and dystopian projections of our imminent digital futures (Du Gay 2003; Henningsen and Larsen, this volume). As many observers have noted, in recent years a shift in the tone of such discussions has occurred, as the optimism that accrued to the Web 2.0 and social media 10-15 years ago has waned, with darker visions being brought to the fore. Today, a probing of the role of social media as vehicles of misinformation, commoditization, and mass surveillance looms large in popular and scholarly discussions alike (Fuchs et al. 2012; Van Dijck 2013). However, there is one notable exception to this trend in the current flora of social media: since the turn of the century, Wikipedia and platforms based on the wiki-technology have been a constant source of positive wonder among commentators. This relates to the democratic nature of the Wikipedia organization, to the deliberative aspect of content production, and to the platforms' persistent avoidance of commercialism (Firer-Blaes and Fuchs 2014; Van Dijck 2013; Wright 2010).ยน Prosumers (Ritzer et al. 2012; Toffler 1980) have contributed millions of articles for Wikipedia and other wiki-platforms. The true wonder of wiki-platforms is their capacity to mobilize contributors in great numbers and to incite them to write and edit articles. Based on a case study of the Norwegian local history wiki platform lokalhistoriewiki.no, we seek to understand what motivates contributors to engage in wiki work, and how this can be specified theoretically. We argue that wiki work is an avenue for the exertion of craftsmanship (Sennett 2009), and that it involves psychological processes of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 2008[1991]) and social processes of self-externalization (Elster 1989). 1 Others present accounts of Wikipedia in a less enchanted tone, pointing to the challenges posed by "Wikipedia trolls" (Shachaf and Hara 2010) and "editorial wars" on the site (Yasseri et al. 2012).
Wiki: How to Improve Information Quality
2009
This work intent to contribute to the discussion about how to obtain quality and credibility in the information of wiki projects. We want to learn what tools we should produce. In this perspective, we intent to answer the following questions: Who is the best evaluator of an information resource? Who is the most trustful information resource producer? In order to answer to those questions, we developed an empirical research. In this empirical research we identified not only the best evaluator and producer but also the best evaluator and producer for specific type of information resource.
Proceedings of the 5th International Symposopn on Wikis and Open Collaboration
Learning "the wiki way", learning through wikis is a form of selfregulated learning that is independent of formal learning settings and takes place in a community of knowledge. Such a community may work jointly on a digital artifact to create new, innovative and emergent knowledge. We regard wikis as a prototype of tools for community-based learning, and point out five relevant features. We will present the co-evolution model, as introduced by Cress and Kimmerle [4], that may be understood as a framework to describe learning in the wiki way. This model describes collaborative knowledge building as a co-evolution between cognitive and social systems. To investigate learning the wiki way, we have to consider both individual processes and processes within the wiki, which represent the processes that are going on within a community. This paper presents three empirical studies that investigate learning the wiki way in a laboratory setting. We take a look at participants' contributions to a wiki indicating processes within the wiki community, and measure the extent of individual learning at the end of the experiment. Our conclusion is that the model of co-evolution has a strong impact on understanding learning the wiki way, may be helpful to designers of learning environments, and serve as framework for further research.
A study of the quality of Wikidata
Journal of Web Semantics, 2021
Wikidata has been increasingly adopted by many communities for a wide variety of applications, which demand high-quality knowledge to deliver successful results. In this paper, we develop a framework to detect and analyze low-quality statements in Wikidata by shedding light on the current practices exercised by the community. We explore three indicators of data quality in Wikidata, based on: 1) community consensus on the currently recorded knowledge, assuming that statements that have been removed and not added back are implicitly agreed to be of low quality; 2) statements that have been deprecated; and 3) constraint violations in the data. We combine these indicators to detect lowquality statements, revealing challenges with duplicate entities, missing triples, violated type rules, and taxonomic distinctions. Our findings complement ongoing efforts by the Wikidata community to improve data quality, aiming to make it easier for users and editors to find and correct mistakes.