A Wikipedia Literature Review

This paper was originally designed as a literature review for a doctoral dissertation focusing on Wikipedia. This exposition gives the structure of Wikipedia and the latest trends in Wikipedia research

Dynamics of Content Quality in Collaborative Knowledge Production

We explore the dynamics of user performance in collaborative knowledge production by studying the quality of answers to questions posted on Stack Exchange. We propose four indicators of answer quality: answer length, the number of code lines and hyperlinks to external web content it contains, and whether it is accepted by the asker as the most helpful answer to the question. Analyzing millions of answers posted over the period from 2008 to 2014, we uncover regular short-term and long-term changes in quality. In the short-term, quality deteriorates over the course of a single session, with each successive answer becoming shorter, with fewer code lines and links, and less likely to be accepted. In contrast, performance improves over the long-term, with more experienced users producing higher quality answers. These trends are not a consequence of data heterogeneity, but rather have a behavioral origin. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between short-term deterioration in performance, potentially due to mental fatigue or attention depletion, and long-term performance improvement due to learning and skill acquisition, and its impact on the quality of user-generated content

Innovating the scenario of scientific publishing in design: designing “living publications”

This article presents an ongoing research project aiming at innovating the modalities and formats of scientific and academic publication of design research. The digital transformation and the open access paradigm have a considerable impact on the circulation of high-quality scientific production at global level: the challenge is to achieve innovative forms of authoritative, high-impact and effective scholarly communication, pursued with a multiscale and mixed media strategy, in order to guarantee an extended impact, while maintaining rigour and authority. In this context the scientific publication of design is taking on new forms and objectives too, so the design discipline can be a pivotal field for the experimentation and discussion of new scientific publication formats for scientific research. The article presents the proposal of Living Publications, that, stemming from a case studies research, supports the envisioning of future scenarios of scientific publishing and the development of the features of an experimental prototype in the design domain

Good Authors = Good Articles? - How Wikis Work

Wikis are websites to develop content collaboratively. The question arises to what extent the reputation of participants influences the quality of wiki sites. We analyze the impact of author reputation using the example of Wikipedia. We extend previous research by considering a set of different reputation metrics and a new model for aggregating reputation values. Since anonymous authors tend to have a lower reputation, we also quantify the level of participation of anonymous authors as an indicator for the reputation of the crowd. Our analysis finds out that reputation matters, but strongly depends on the used reputation metric and therefore on the corresponding author characteristics. The study shows that the experience of authors in the development of high-quality articles is highly relevant whereas the number of edits and the quality of contributions are of lower importance. Finally, our investigation proves the open editing model and the self-healing mechanism of wikis

Innovating the scenario of scientific publishing in design: designing “living publications”.

This article presents an ongoing research project aiming at innovating the modalities and formats of scientific and academic publication of design research. The digital transformation and the open access paradigm have a considerable impact on the circulation of high-quality scientific production at global level: the challenge is to achieve innovative forms of authoritative, high-impactand effective scholarly communication, pursued with a multiscale and mixed media strategy, in order to guarantee an extended impact, while maintaining rigour and authority. In this context the scientific publication of design is taking on new forms and objectives too, so the design discipline can be a pivotal field for the experimentation and discussion of new scientific publication formats for scientific research. The article presents the preliminary findings of the project PRODE. Scientific production indesigndeveloped at the Design department of Politecnico di Milano: the case studies research and the proposal of Living Publications, that support the envisioning of future scenarios of scientific publishing and the development of an experimental prototype of Living publications Formatin the design domain

Similarities, challenges and opportunities of wikipedia content and open source projects

Copyright @ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Several years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content. In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of “usefulness” and “modularity” we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects

Mining and Predicting Temporal Patterns in the Quality Evolution of Wikipedia Articles

Online open collaboration systems like Wikipedia are complex adaptive systems within which large numbers of individual agents and artifacts interact and co-evolve over time. A key issue in these systems is the quality of the co-created artifacts and the processes through which high-quality artifacts are produced. In this paper, we took a dynamic approach to uncover common patterns in the temporal evolution of 6,057 Wikipedia articles in the domains of roads, films, and battles. Using Dynamic Time Warping, an advanced time-series clustering method, we identified three distinctive growth patterns, namely, stalled, plateaued, and sustained. Multinomial logistic regressions to predict these different clusters suggest that the path that an article follows is determined by both its inherent attributes, such as topic importance, and the contribution and coordination of editors who collaborated on the article. Our results also suggest that different factors matter at different stages of an article’s life cycle

The Lifecycle of "Facts": A Survey of Social Bias in Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs are increasingly used in a plethora of downstream tasks or in the augmentation of statistical models to improve factuality. However, social biases are engraved in these representations and propagate downstream. We conducted a critical analysis of literature concerning biases at different steps of a knowledge graph lifecycle. We investigated factors introducing bias, as well as the biases that are rendered by knowledge graphs and their embedded versions afterward. Limitations of existing measurement and mitigation strategies are discussed and paths forward are proposed.Comment: Accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 202