Bots in Wikipedia: Unfolding their duties

The success of crowdsourcing systems such as Wikipedia relies on people participating in these systems. However, in this research we reveal to what extent human and machine intelligence is combined to carry out semi-automatic workflows of complex tasks. In Wikipedia, bots are used to realize such combination of human-machine intelligence. We provide an extensive overview on various edit types bots carry out in this regard through the analysis of 1,639 approved task requests. We classify existing tasks by an action-object-pair structure and reveal existing differences in their probability of occurrence depending on the investigated work context. In the context of community services, bots mainly create reports, whereas in the area of guidelines or policies bots are mostly responsible for adding templates to pages. Moreover, the analysis of existing bot tasks revealed insights that suggest general reasons, why Wikipedia’s editor community uses bots as well as approaches, how they organize machine tasks to provide a sustainable service. We conclude by discussing how these insights can prepare the foundation for further research

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

Discussing international perspectives on Open Learning in Brazil: educational politics and pedagogical principles

This paper aims to present some of the new tendencies in Open Learning in the context of international online higher education. These tendencies work as a basis for a discussion of the role of e-learning in online higher education in Brazil. The use of open source technologies and the constant search for quality and innovative pedagogies in the teaching and learning process constitute a new trend in international distance education. The main concern nowadays seems to be with ‘quality’ and ‘widening participation’, which result in initiatives such as ‘Open Educational Resources’. In Brazil, the creation of the Brazilian Open University (UAB) would appear to be consistent with these tendencies. The challenge now is to be able to set up a system that attends to national needs while being open to international tendencies. This paper aims to explore some of these issues, and also to present the most recent freeware technologies used for the purpose of enhancing open learning initiatives

A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines

The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world processes and activities including human communication, interactions and knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level. This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the associated challenges of security and privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Why won't they take them on? A study on student teachers' first-time engagement with wiki technology

The topic of the dissertation is the use of wikis in teacher education. The study is based on two classroom interventions involving first-time use of wiki technology. In the first, 18 students of Social studies created a Wikipedia article; in the second, 13 students of Norwegian co-edited a fiction-based, class-only wiki. The study is concerned with how the student teachers engage with, make sense of, and assess the pedagogical value of wikis. Two research questions are asked, representing two stages in the research process: 1, what are possible benefits of using wikis in teacher education? 2, why do students express reluctance to “take on” wikis in their professional practice? Data was gathered through a survey, students’ logs and response texts, individual interviews, field notes, and the wikis’ records of user activities. The data shows that the students, having little or no previous knowledge of wikis, quickly master editing and discover how wikis like Wikipedia are created and maintained. Their logs show that they begin to perceive the wikis as socio-technical systems involving both human and technological agency. However, when the students are interviewed about the experience later, they display reluctance towards “taking on” wikis in their own teaching and their accounts have become more aligned with more traditional, received notions of technology. The study adds to the research on pedagogical use of wikis and on factors affecting new teachers’ uptake of new technologies. The analysis points to uptake as not only related to more commonly identified barriers but also informed by the discursive environment. The study concludes that teacher education needs to include more explicit theorization about technology and its role and purpose in education. The versatility, complexity and transparency of wikis make them particularly suitable technologies for addressing these issues. The dissertation consists of five published articles and a summarizing text (“kappe”) of four chapters

Assessing Knowledge Organization Systems from a gender perspective: Wikipedia Taxonomy and Wikidata Ontologies

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization system (KOS), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender non-binary perspective.This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia's Knowledge Organization Systems, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia's taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.This study evaluates Wikipedia's taxonomy and Wikidata's ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia's categorization challenges.The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on Knowledge Organization System standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall knowledge organization system to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.</p

The Wikipedia imaginaire: a new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)

This paper presents a media biography of Wikipedia’s data that focuses on the interpretative flexibility of Wikipedia and digital knowledge between the years 2001 and 2022. To do so, I not only follow a strand of media historians who argue that the imagination is an important component for understanding how media change, but I also argue that Wikipedia’s data has been incorporated, re-imagined, and repurposed by sociotechnical projects in ways that have often been side-lined despite acting as the boundary lines of what is considered digital knowledge. It combines Patrice Flichy’s longitudinal theory of technical development as an imaginaire, Frederik Lesage and Simone Natale’s historical approach of biographies of media with an analysis of the interpretative flexibility of new media. Through an eclectic corpus of project websites, new articles, press releases, and blogs, I demonstrate the unexpected ways the online encyclopedia has permeated throughout digital culture over the past twenty years through projects like the Citizendium, Everipedia, Google Search and AI software. As a result of this analysis, I explain how this array of meanings and materials constitutes the Wikipedia imaginaire: a collective activity of sociotechnical development that is fundamental to understanding the ideological and utopian meaning of knowledge with digital culture