Collaborative Writing: Wiki and Wikipedia

Keshava P Subramanya (keshava@cs.ucsb.edu)Roopa Kannan (roopakannan@cs.ucsb.edu)

Today’s Talk Quick introduction about the wiki and

collaborative writing idea. Wikipedia Two views of how Wikipedia works Criticisms Details about the Community Future

What is collaborative writing?

Projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually

Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team

Many grow without any top-down oversight.

Computer based collaborative writing

Revision control software providing check-in/out ( example subversion, cvs )

Enterprise information portal, Content management system

SharePoint Wikis

Some Collab projects

Novel Twists Online collaborative novel where each of the 150 pages is written one at a time by a different person.

co-write.me.uk The Linux documentation project OOoAuthors

What is a Wiki

Essentially a dynamic, collectively authored set of web pages.

Invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham to facilitate online collaboration about programming and design best practices.

Evolved by the early 2000’s into a way to facilitate all kinds of online collaboration.

Wiki – Definition

A wiki (according to Ward Cunningham) is a type of website that allows users to add and edit content and is especially suited for constructive collaborative authoring.

In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the process of creating HTML pages combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can be reverted to any of its previous states.

As defined in Wikipedia.

How the Wiki Got Its Name

Wiki is the Hawaiian word meaning “quick”, “fast”, or “to hasten”.

Wiki-Wiki is the name of the bus line in the Honolulu International Airport.

How the Wiki Got Its Name

How the Wiki Got Its Name

“Wiki-wiki to the beach.” - Elvis Presley (as Chad Gates) in the movie Blue Hawaii (1961). The line was said with a snap of the fingers.

Some more …

Wiki (according to UIC Prof. Steve Jones)Web-basedInteractiveKollaborative

(collaborative)Iterative

Wiki is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “What I Know Is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage and exchange function.

More Uses for a Wiki 100 things to do before you die The world’s largest “How-To” manual –

wikiHow Things to do in Seattle World-wide travel guide – wikitravel.org Everything you want to know about VoIP All about the flu – Flu Wiki

wikihost.org free-wiki-hosting.comwikicities.comeducational.blogs.comduckcomputing.compbwiki.comwikispaces.com

Free Hosting of Wikis

What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopaedia

written by thousands of volunteers in many languages

Free license allows others to freely copy, redistribute, and modify work commercially or non-commercially

Founded January 15, 2001 Run by the wikimedia foundation.

wikipedia.org

What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

Non-profit foundation Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were $321,000 USD, with

hardware making up almost 60% of the budget Where does it get the money ?

Aim: to distribute a free encyclopaedia to every single person on the planet in their own language

Wikipedia and its sister projects

wikimediafoundation.org

Advantages of Freely Licensed Content

GNU Free Documentation Licence Remains non-proprietary Enhances the popularity of Wikipedia Decreases individual sense of ownership Increases a sense of shared ownership

Free Software

MediaWiki is GPL Uses all free software on the website GNU/Linux Apache MySQL Php

How big is Wikipedia?

English Wikipedia is largest and has over 260 million words

English Wikipedia larger than Britannica and Microsoft Encarta combined

In 15 months the publicly distributed compressed database dumps may reach 1 terabyte total size

How big is Wikipedia Globally?

Total more than 5 million articles! English – 1,412,000 articles German – 172,000 articles Japanese – 87,000 articles French – 66,000 articles Swedish –53,000 articles Over 5 million across 250 languages 19 with >10,000. 52 with >1000

(statistics could be dated)

How popular is Wikipedia?

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia (ranked ~ 20th) is more popular than the websites of:

IBM Paypal Open Directory Project Geocities ~400 Million page views monthly

Wikipedia vs. Britannica AP article on CNN website

This study was challenged by Encyclopædia Britannica, who described it as "fatally flawed.“ source www.wikipedia.org

Wikimedia Projects

Wikipedia Wiktionary Wikibooks Wikiquote Wikispecies Wikimedia Commons Wikinews

Wikinews

Community edited news along the same principles of Wikipedia

Fairly new project Aim of the project

wikinews.org

Wikimedia’s Hardware

30+ servers Squid caching servers in front to serve cached

objects quickly Apache/PHP webservers in the middle Database backend (MySql)

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is one of many wiki engines Collaborative software that allows users to add

or edit content Primarily developed for Wikipedia from 2002

onwards Scalable and multilingual Free license

MediaWiki features

Quality control features (versioning) Editing features (simple markup) Community features (talk pages, profiles,

access levels)

Page History

DEMO

Interlanguage linkingDEMO

Criticism Workshop

Hints: Can Wikipedia Content Be Trusted? Systematic bias Reliability of Information Technology requirement

Can Wikipedia Content Be Trusted?

Review processes Partly post-moderation, partly reactive

moderation Linking to particular revisions Development of a stable version Free license allows you to modify it

Reliability of Information Criticism The community contribution

approach allows for too much false information.

Without an expert background a person can not present an unbiased, factual position.

Rebuttal The open source approach

allows for new information to be added on a daily basis.

The articles that exist on Wikipedia are a group effort where any wrong information can be edited.

The group editing also lets people combine information to get a broad background.

Reliability of Information

Criticism The large quantity of daily

information added prevents proper fact checking.

The daily edits allow too many mistakes to go unnoticed or be reintroduced.

Rebuttal Wikipedia does maintain a staff

whose sole purpose is to review and edit articles.

Each day articles are viewed by thousands of people, any one person can implement changes to correct mistakes.

Printed encyclopedias can not fix errors once released, while Wikipedia is always able to make corrections.

Systematic Bias Criticism Systematic bias exposes

WIkipedia to unbalanced amounts of information.

People are more likely to write about topics that interest them as opposed to more historically significant topics.

Rebuttal Past requests for information

have been met with quick action.

These responses have created huge increases in the amount of coverage of topics.

Wikipedia also includes a inquiry page. Any topic can be requested and the Wiki community is quick to respond.

Technology Requirements

Criticism Wikipedia faces technology

constraints as an online encyclopedia.

A reader must have Internet access at all times.

The possibility of tech failure on the Wikipedia’s end also presents problems.

Rebuttal The technology constraints

constantly decrease as the world becomes more advanced.

The student population has almost 100% Internet access due to school resources and class requirements.

Latest Information

Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time.

The software of Wikipedia allows for rapid updating of existing articles, as well as constant introduction of new topics.

Quick Vandalism Response

Most vandalisms on Wikipedia are reverted within five minutes.

There is a record of change made to every page and Wikipedia volunteers watch the list of recent changes.

If a user constantly vandalizes pages of Wikipedia, individuals can be blocked and pages can be locked down.

Neutral Point of View

Three sides to everything, your version, my version, and the truth

Editors are asked to maintain a neutral point of view when writing for Wikipedia.

When editing wars break out and neutral points of view are not maintained, Wikipedia volunteers usually remove the information posted.

Click here

Two Views of Wikipedia•Emergent

•Community of thoughtful users

Emergent

Thousands of individual users who don’t know each other each contribute a little bit

Out of this emerges a coherent body of work

A Community?

A dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the content.

London Berlin

Genoa

ImplicationsEmergent Model Need reputation

mechanisms like Ebay, Slashdot

Users are tiny, have no power

Community Model Reputation is a natural

outcome of human interactions

Users are powerful, must be respected

80/10 Rule

Counting only logged in users, and even excluding some prominent approved bot users

10 percent of all users make 80% of all edits 5 percent of all users make 66% of edits Half of all edits are made by just 2 1/2 percent

of all users

Edits by Anons

Controversial, intriguing Yes, you can edit this page Without logging in!

Anonymous ip numbers can edit Wikipedia But these edits make up a total of around 18%

of all edits, with some evidence of a downward trend over time

Edits across namespaces

Articles 85% Talk pages 8% User Page 3% User Talk Pages 4%These percentages are stable in 2003And 2004

Wikipedia is a community…

•How does it work?•Who are the users?

•How do they self-regulate?

Many types of users

As in any society, there are many types of people -- these types are reflected in editing patterns

Individual users may not fit cleanly into a single type, but thinking about editing patterns is a helpful way to understand the community

Broad Types

Worker Bees, POV pushers Police, Judges Controversy lovers - Moths Pseudo-users - Sock puppets, Vandals Extra-Wiki - Mailing list, IRC, Board activities,

Developers

Bees

The most important users at Wikipedia

But may go unnoticed unless special attention is given

Generalists Specialists Proof-readers

Question: What attracts the bees??

Sock Puppet

Not all sock puppets are bad

Privacy The chance to start over But when used wrongly,

is one of the worst offenses

Moth

Drawn to flames Not necessarily a bad

thing - some people thrive on controversy

Vandal Less of a problem for the community than most

people assume Vandalism is easy to revert, and blocking vandals

(temporarily) slows them down and takes the fun away

Outside the Wiki

Developers - coders and system admins IRC Channels Mailing lists

Wikipedia Governance

A confusing but workable mix of Consensus Democracy Aristocracy Monarchy

Community Challenges

How can such a large community scale?– Through software features– Through policy (mediation, arbitration)– Through an atmosphere of love and respect

Community Self-Regulation

Quality control features: recent changes, watchlists, related changes, page histories, user contributions lists

Community features: talk pages, user profiles, access levels, user-to-user email, message notification.

International Community

Interlanguage linking of articles Choice of language interface Global newsletter: Quarto “Translation of the week”

Conclusion

Wikipedia is a community Automated and artificial Slashdot-style

reputation metrics are not needed and may not be desirable

Achieving quality levels equalling or exceeding traditional publishing models can be expected without “emergent” magic

Credits

http://www.wikipedia.org and related sites Some slides adapted from

– Jimmy Wales President, Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia Founder– Prof. Burks Oakley II Prof of E.C.E University of Illinois