Social Search and Need-driven Knowledge Sharing in Wikis with Woogle

Social Search andNeed-driven Knowledge Sharingin Wikis with Woogle Hans-Jörg Happel, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration 2009 (WikiSym’09), Orlando, FL

Wikis• Web-based repositories for sharing

consensual knowledge in a collaborative fashion

• In enterprises, Wikis often act as a layer of "glue" code relating content from other information systems and capturing all the rest– Wikis are a typical entry point for information

seeking– People are often confused why and what to

put into the Wiki

2Social Search and Need-driven Knowledge Sharing with Woogle / WikiSym 2009

There are two kinds of people in a Wiki…

Readers• Have information needs, but

only few means for articula-ting such needs (e.g. search)

• Search is an inherently social activity

– 40,4% of users interact with others before and during search; 58,7% share information after search [EC08]

• Only few readers become contributors

Contributors• Have limited ressources

(time/effort) and face futher barriers (motivation, privacy)

• Choices on contributions are seldom based on demand of readers (lack of guidance)

• Wiki communities stress the relevance of content („what is worth to be documented“)

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• Knowledge sharing is a communication process• Artificial decoupling of readers and contributors in Wikis

Social Search and Need-driven Knowledge Sharing with Woogle / WikiSym 2009

• Search in MediaWiki– No query logs– „Red links“ (links to non-existing pages) are

the basic means to „demand“ content


Contributing in MediaWiki

• Are Wikis really contribution-friendly?– „Red links“ do not tell how much this

information is required– The „empty-page“ phenomenon (How to

start an article)


(Media)Wikis can do better• Improve search with collaborative

features• Allow people to express information

needs• Provide a first-order representation for

information needs• Guide contributions by aggregating

information needs („need-driven knowledge sharing“)


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Collaborative description of the information need

Notifications concerningsearch activities

Discussion page

Directly create new knowledge from the search dialog

Search has a URI and can be linked from within the Wiki(one page per search term)

Search across different data sources/types (WoogleRemote)

Additional clues with meta-information about a need

http://localhost/wiki/Woogle:Woogle4MediaWiki

Social Search and Need-driven Knowledge Sharing with Woogle / WikiSym 2009

Demand guidance

• Woogle uses queries and further metadata to qualify desired content

• Users are informed how strong the information need is, and in which context it arises


Evaluation goals• Research questions

– How to derive and aggregate unsatisfied information needs?

– Are Woogle features effective to foster wiki contributions?

• Challenges– Proving these claims requires real-world data– This requires production-quality, usable

software


Evaluation design• Qualitative, semi-structured interviews• Online Field Experiments

– Instrumentation addon which keeps track of configurable user groups, logging and privacy

• Online surveys


Initial evaluation results• Qualitative interviews (n=8)

– People share on demand– People are „privacy pragmatics“

• Half share openly while half tends to control private content• Revealing queries is OK if anoymized vs. curiosity about what others search

• Online Field Experiement #1 (n=44)– Internal wiki: 1967 content pages, 165 registered users, 42 active

users– Raw results from study data (2009-07-14 till 2009-10-23)

• 44 users accepted to participate (25 declined)• Those who accepted logged in 973 times• Issued 1904 queries clicking 830 results (19 to exernal results)• 1636 article saves (up to 251 new pages - many related to red links or search) • 38 watches set• 6 "Woogle"-Pages about 3 topics, created by two users (all for

redirection/mispellings)


Related work• Collaborative IR/“Social search“

– Focus on synchronous collaboration– Do not address information provision

• Wiki & Search (Wikia Search, Google SearchWiki, …)– Primarily focus on ranking/result annotation– Focus on the Web

• Q/A systems (e.g. Yahoo Answers)– Lack „consensual spirit“ of Wikis– Do not consider external content/results


Summary• Woogle addresses the atificial separation of information

seeking and information provision in Wikis– Offers information seekers means to express needs– Guides contributors by aggregating demands

• Woogle will soon be ready for download– www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Woogle4MediaWiki– Online Demo at www.teamweaver.org– Feedback & additional evaluation partners sought!– First prototype for Atlassian Confluence exists

• Next steps– Integrate additional „social search“ features (e.g. social

ranking)– Think about additional means of expressing information needs– Targeting Semantic MediaWiki (e.g. [Hap08a])


Literature• [EC08] Evans, B. M. and Chi, E. H. 2008. Towards a model of understanding social search. In

Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Diego, CA, USA, November 08 - 12, 2008). CSCW '08. ACM, New York, NY, 485-494.

• [Hap08a] Hans-Jörg Happel: Growing the Semantic Web with Inverse Semantic Search. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Incentives for the Semantic Web (INSEMTIVE '08)

• [Hap08b] Hans-Jörg Happel: Closing Information Gaps with Inverse Search. In Proceeedings of the 7th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM2008)

• [Hap09a] Hans-Jörg Happel: Woogle – On Why and How to Marry Wikis with Enterprise Search. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Integrated Knowledge Management Systems (IKMS2009)

• [Hap09b] Hans-Jörg Happel: Towards Need-driven Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Teams. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Management (I-KNOW 2009)


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