WikisFor Conference Communications

ASIST 2006

Bradley Hemminger

School of Information and Library Science

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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Community Communications

• We want to further support scholarly and social communications for professional society communities, in particular activities such as conferences.

• What strengths do new technologies such as Blogs and Wikis provide that could enhance existing conference structures?

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Vision

• Currently conferences produce static proceedings, which are summaries of presentations (abstracts to full papers). Having a way to raise questions, comment on ideas, or express relationships between them could enhance discussions at the conference, as well as provide a richer environment to search after the conference.

• Wikis could provide the virtual “space” where these more interactive discussions take place.

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Vision cont’d

• People can pose questions, or suggest areas of interest to the speakers and panelists before, during and after the conference.

• People can comment on anything (presentations, social events or activities).

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Example: Before Event

• “could you spend more time addressing the implications of Google Print on public libraries”

• “How significant do the speakers think this work is given that a large majority of the audience (lower income homes) do not have a computer at home.”

• [authors] We won’t address the economic implications in this panel session. However, the session [link] at the conference will, and more complete coverage could be found in the recent proceedings of ExctlyWhtUWnt 2003 [link].

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Examples: After event

• “John Smith jsmith@hotmail.com raises a good point. We think it could have an effect because while many lower incomes households do not have computers in the home, over 60% do through public schools or public libraries [WishIhadThisReference, 2002 http://XXX].

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Social Communications

• Not all communications need be “scholarly”. Part of building the community is by bringing the people closer together through sharing information about each other, their activities, their interests. So facilitating social events, SIGs, Birds of a Feather can help build community.

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ASIST 2005 Wiki Design Choices

• Simple Clean Appearance• Simple and Easy to Use

– No login required.

– Not limited to attendees. To encourage participation from everyone. Widen the audience, maybe create future ASIST attendees or members.

– Anonymous editing encourages people to try it.

– Help tools to get novices started.

• Link program materials to wiki pages

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Take Look--ASIST 2005 web site

• Panel Session Example• Social Events Example• Making new pages to deal with changing

categories or content is easy. (Example of “chapters” under social events).

• Browse the wiki, see where you think people spent time and energy. I’ll ask you later … (http://www.ils.unc.edu/asist2005/wiki/)

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Concerns: What about spammers, vandals, folks who just disagree?

• Malicious– Change content to cause problems or harass

– Add links in our content to increase their page rank

• Friendly – Example LISwiki.com. I “moderated” by making new

category and page to hold this and similar objects. (about page)

• Disagree– Saying false, or negative things in public space

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Dealing with Concerns

• Revision history allows easy backing out of undesired changes. But requires an attentive operator during critical times (for ASIST, this would be the duration of the conference).

• Can this really work? Without rules, or a hierarchy, and administration?? Look at wikipedia…

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Blog vs Wiki: Similarities

• Interactive

• Current

• Many authors can comment on same material.

• Dynamically change structure of information, organization of information.

• Can be topic based.

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Blogs vs Wikis Differences

• Blog: author based, more as expression space for recognized individual authors.

• Wiki is more based on content/community. Does not necessary distinguish or identify authors. Easy to setup structure paralleling existing conference event structures with one page per event or program item.

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Coordination of Blogs/Wikis for ASIST 2005

• Blogs and Wikis independently proposed.

• Coordinated after both “approved”

• Competing for the same eyeballs

• Chose to not “educate” (bias) audience towards one or the other, but to make both available and let folks try them, and get feedback.

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You tell me!

• What do you think the successes or failures of the ASIST wiki were?

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Results

• What did people use– Social communications (a fair bit, especially

viewing)– Scholarly communications (only very little, and

almost all of it was related to ones own work)

• Lots of views– Significant attendee viewing during conference,

but overall mostly robots

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Statistics Nov 08 2005

• Site statistics• There are 1,419 total pages in the database. This includes

"talk" pages, pages about ASISTWiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 136 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

• There have been a total of 48,820 page views, and 1,120 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 0.79 average edits per page, and 43.59 views per edit.

• User statistics• There are 73 registered users, of which 3 (or 0.21%) are

administrators

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• Main Page (41,928 views) • About the wiki (21,551 views) • CRADLE discussion on ASIST 2005 Wikis and Blogs (15,184 views) • Attractions (11,998 views) • Let us know what you think about the wiki! (7,923 views) • Sunday (7,247 views) • How do I use the wiki? (7,199 views) • Tuesday (5,616 views) • Social Events (5,199 views) • Saturday (5,001 views) • Conference Participants (4,943 views) • New Members and First Time Attendees Brunch (4,675 views) • Wednesday (4,575 views) • Birds of a Feather (4,158 views) • Friday (3,912 views) • SIG get-togethers (3,713 views) • Governance (3,369 views) • Contact us (3,361 views) • Digital Reference: an Analysis of its Use by Children and Teenagers

(3,321 views) • Seminars (3,206 views) • Restaurants (3,205 views) • Monday (3,151 views) • Hotels (2,907 views) • Wireless Access (2,506 views) • Knowledge Map of Information Science: A Report on a Delphi Study

(2,486 views)

Most popular pages

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Views Per Day

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Edits per day

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Registered User Edits

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Anonymous User Edits

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SysOp User Edits

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Spam Edits

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Thoughts….

• Pretty good for social communications• Pretty unused for commentary on scholarly portion. Will

require more education, incentives for people to change behavior and use this as a place to share information.

• Definitely underutilized because no live internet (wireless) access in conference rooms.

• Helped by efforts we made to promote the wiki (handouts with registration, mentioned in talks, email to listservs). Compare with ASIST 2006.

• SPAM was an issue.

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We Want YOU!

• Help make this years wiki and blogs successful by participating yourself. Add content to them. Give us feedback.

• Brad Hemminger, bmh@ils.unc.edu

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The End

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Extra Material

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Significant Dates

• Conference Oct 25th – Nov 2nd 2005

• Nov 18th 2005 Logins required

• Jan 4th 2006 Changed to Read Only (but some spammers still gained access)

• May 2006 Effectively shut down outside edits

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Require wiki logins?

• Users setup—use password verification for additional security (media wiki after 1.6)

• Preload all users (we setup batch way to do this for all ASIST members using their member ID, but chose not to do this)

• Do not require any login—we thought this was best given our goal to encourage people to easier use a system they may not be familiar with.

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Handling Spam

• Team that constantly checks for spam– Recent changes– Block problem ip addresses

• Tools for this ( )

• Require authenticated logins

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Statistics Nov 08 2005

• Site statistics• There are 1,419 total pages in the database. This includes

"talk" pages, pages about ASISTWiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 136 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

• There have been a total of 48,820 page views, and 1,120 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 0.79 average edits per page, and 43.59 views per edit.

• User statistics• There are 73 registered users, of which 3 (or 0.21%) are

administrators

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Statistics Nov 30 2005

• Site statistics• There are 1,425 total pages in the database. This includes

"talk" pages, pages about ASISTWiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 133 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

• There have been a total of 95,796 page views, and 1,330 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 0.93 average edits per page, and 72.03 views per edit.

• User statistics• There are 97 registered users, of which 3 (or 0.21%) are

administrators

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Statistics Jan 03 2006

• Site statistics• There are 1,428 total pages in the database. This includes

"talk" pages, pages about ASISTWiki, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 136 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

• There have been a total of 195,078 page views, and 1,544 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 1.08 average edits per page, and 126.35 views per edit.

• User statistics• There are 175 registered users, of which 3 (or 0.21%) are

administrators

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What is a Wiki?(weekee, from Hawaiian term for superfast)

• “A wiki is a freely-expandable collection of interlinked web “pages”, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information – a database, where each page is easily editable by any user.”

• “Wiki is a …collaborative space…because of its total freedom, ease of access, and use, [and] simple and uniform navigational conventions … [It]…is also a way to organize and cross-link information.” (Leuf & Ward Cunningham 2001,p14-16).

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About Wikis

• Wikis are an example of social software (blogs, IM, IRC). They permit groups of people to work together in a virtual environment. No special privileges are required, edits are input on the document itself, all updates are visible immediately.

• http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/WMW-I.pdf for summary of wikimedia.