Web engineering:Wikipedia

Irina Karpovaikarpova@uni-koblenz.de

Universität Koblenz-Landau

29. Januar 2013

Overview• Wikipedia as online community:• Purpose• Aims of Wikipedia

• Software• Wiki Way of Web

• Guidelines and policies• Wikipedians

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3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page screenshot taken on 22.01.13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About screenshot taken on 23.01.13

Wikipedia

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Online community

Communication among a group of people ‘‘who come together for a particular purpose, and who are guided by policies (including norms and rules) and supported by software’’ (by Preece and Maloney-Krichmar (2005))

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by Patton (2002)

Model of Wikipedia development

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by Zhao and Bishop (2011)

Visual representation of the elements of Wikipedia as an online community

Overview• Wikipedia as online community:• Purpose• Aims of Wikipedia

• Software• Wiki Way of Web

• Guidelines and policies• Wikipedians

• http://www.jamesyang.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/golf-world-fight.jpg

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Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to COLLECT KNOWLEDGE disseminated around the globe; TO SET

forth its GENERAL SYSTEM to the men with whom we live, and TRANSMIT IT to

those who will come after us [1]

Denis Diderot [3]

Larry Sanger [2]

Our goal with Wikipedia is to create a FREE

ENCYCLOPEDIA; indeed, the LARGEST encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of

depth. We also want Wikipedia to be a RELIABLE

RESOURCE [1]

http://www.oed.com/search?q=encyclopaedia screenshot taken on 22.01.13

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Oxford English Dictionary: A literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge, usually arranged in alphabetical order [4]

Encyclopedia Britannica: Reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner [5]

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Aims of Wikipedia Gain all valuable knowledge in

comfortable reading form Provide free content via

GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons

Everyone could edit and create articles

Be neutral

Overview• Wikipedia as online community:• Purpose• Aims of Wikipedia

• Software• Wiki Way of Web

• Guidelines and policies• Wikipedians

• http://www.jamesyang.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/golf-world-fight.jpg

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Wiki way of Web

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Wikimedia foundations’ projects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiNode screenshot taken on 22.01.13

Ward Cunningham,

inventor of the wiki [7]

http://c2.com/w4/wikibase/?FrontPage screenshot taken on 22.01.13

„The simplest online database that could

possibly work.WIKI IS a piece of server SOFTWARE that allows

users TO FREELY CREATE AND EDIT WEB PAGE

content using any Web browser”[6]

Wiki way of web: software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software screenshots taken on 22.01.1313

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard/Ready_for_submission; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vanilla_software&action=history;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor:Test screenshots taken on 23.01.13

Wiki way of web: software

Overview• Wikipedia as online community:• Purpose• Aims of Wikipedia

• Software• Wiki Way of Web

• Guidelines and policies• Wikipedians

• http://www.jamesyang.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/golf-world-fight.jpg

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16http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_antenna; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_valve; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Laden; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber Screenshots taken on 22.01.13

Neutral point of view

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Wikipedians: types

• Administrators: 1,458• Account creators: 154• Autopatrollers: 2,871• Bots: 730• Bureaucrats: 35• Checkusers: 40• Confirmed users: 292• Edit filter managers: 158• File movers: 333

• Founders: 1• Importers: 1• IP block exemptions: 401• Oversighters: 39• Researchers: 8• Reviewers: 5,741• Rollbackers: 4,772• Stewards: 0• Transwiki importers: 0

Regarding their user rights, there are such user groups [8]:

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Increase of polices’ descriptions(from Butler, Joyce, Pike (2008))

Policy article 2001 2008Copyright 341 words 3200 w.What Wikipedia is not 541 words 5031 w.Civility 1741 words 2131 w.Consensus 192 words 2054 w.Deletion 405 words 2340 w.Ignore all the rules 23 words 16 w.

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Which user actions are regulated?

[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines (also on the next pages: screenshots taken on 25.01.13)

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Which user actions are regulated?

Dear Sir, I think your article is a pure garbage!

I disapprove!

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Which user actions are regulated?

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Simplified Wikipedia consensus flowchart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus screenshot taken on 25.01.13

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Wikipedia vs. Britannica

D.I. Mendeleev, co-creator of the Periodic System of Chemical Elements

13th or 14th child in the family?

Wiki:162

errors

EB:123

errors[10]

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Power of community

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Saunders screenshots taken on 20.01.13 and 22.01.13

Links1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose2. Image source: http://www.geek.com/gearlog/images/larry-sanger-wikipedia.jpg3. Image source: http

://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Portrait_de_Denis_Diderot_en_robe_de_chambre.jpg/220px-Portrait_de_Denis_Diderot_en_robe_de_chambre.jpg

4. http://www.oed.com/search?q=encyclopaedia5. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/186603/encyclopaedia6. http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki7. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ward_Cunningham_-_Commons-1.jpg8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#cite_note-29. Image source: http://

www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=24340.0;attach=52304;image10. Image source: http://

www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/factotem/images/Mendeleev_home.jpg

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References1. Preece, J., and Maloney-Krichmar, D. (2005). Online communities: Design, theory, and

practice. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/preece.html

2. Brian Butler, Elisabeth Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike. 2008. Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1101-1110.

3. Xiaoli Zhao , M. J. Bishop (2011). Understanding and supporting online communities of practice: lessons learned from Wikipedia. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11423-011-9204-7?LI=true#page-1

4. Todd Holloway, Miran Bozicevic, Katy Börner. 2007. Analyzing and visualizing the semantic coverage of Wikipedia and its authors: Research Articles. Submitted to Complexity, Special issue on Understanding Complex Systems. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0512085

5. Jim Giles. Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head. In: Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005), DOI: 10.1038/438900a.

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Thank you for

your attention!