Discussing the Past: The Production of Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia

This dissertation investigates how historical knowledge is produced in one of the most central digital communities of knowledge, Wikipedia. In 2001, the American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales founded the online encyclopedia, its main concept being that “anyone can edit any page at any time.” This concept allowed Wikipedia to function also as a common and public space for personal reflection. Wikipedia provides this opportunity through the portal of “talk,” as each Wikipedia entry has its own “talk” area. This study explores how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. The project is based on multiple methodologies ranging from qualitative analysis of Wikipedia pages related to history, survey with Wikipedia editors, to quantitative analysis of participatory practices within the Wikipedia community. The main argument is that Wikipedia allows people to discuss the past, express their opinions and emotions about history and its significance in the present and the future through the portal of “talk” that Wikipedia provides. Wikipedia offers a public and digital space for personal engagement and reflection on the production of historical knowledge. Wikipedia users develop multiple relations with the past, take part in discussions and debates about history and its representation, and in that way produce historical knowledge. This does not mean that all Wikipedia users have the same role and power in the production of historical knowledge. Historical knowledge is not just a product of collaboration and public discussion but result of hierarchy and power. That explains why there is so much discussion behind the main articles, which leads in so little editing. Wikipedia allows all its users to discuss the editing process of a Wikipedia article and express their own historical understandings in the “talk page” of the article, but few of them, the most experienced editors, can make their contributions part of the main entry

On Cultural Materialism, Comics and Digital Media

In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) accounted for the paradigm shift that mechanical reproduction meant for art and politics. For Benjamin, technological change was not merely a sign of uncomplicated, forward-thinking progress; it meant a profound transformation of the realm of human experience. In this account of the era Benjamin witnessed, the German philosopher and collector was also unknowingly predicting a time he personally would not experience: four decades later, these descriptions of his time are illuminating the reality of the present. Benjamin wrote that ‘the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room’, but he was not describing digital 3D imaging, Wikipedia, YouTube or Google; he was writing about film photography and the phonograph, forms of technology many now consider ‘obsolete’. The fact we can identify that sense of wonder at technology’s ability to make the absent present and vice versa proves Benjamin’s point: that there is a ‘logic of form’ in art and technology, or, in other words, that the future and the present are also contained in the past, as new technologies and art forms do not simply supersede present and anterior ones, but depend on them. Benjamin's work has proven so influential because, unlike the digital media ‘pundits’ of today, he did not predict the future, but analysed the present

Disaster Monitoring with Wikipedia and Online Social Networking Sites: Structured Data and Linked Data Fragments to the Rescue?

In this paper, we present the first results of our ongoing early-stage research on a realtime disaster detection and monitoring tool. Based on Wikipedia, it is language-agnostic and leverages user-generated multimedia content shared on online social networking sites to help disaster responders prioritize their efforts. We make the tool and its source code publicly available as we make progress on it. Furthermore, we strive to publish detected disasters and accompanying multimedia content following the Linked Data principles to facilitate its wide consumption, redistribution, and evaluation of its usefulness.Comment: Accepted for publication at the AAAI Spring Symposium 2015: Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect fit or Overkill? #SD4HumTech1

A Topic Recommender for Journalists

The way in which people acquire information on events and form their own opinion on them has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. For many readers, the news gathered from online sources become an opportunity to share points of view and information within micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, mainly aimed at satisfying their communication needs. Furthermore, the need to deepen the aspects related to news stimulates a demand for additional information which is often met through online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. This behaviour has also influenced the way in which journalists write their articles, requiring a careful assessment of what actually interests the readers. The goal of this paper is to present a recommender system, What to Write and Why, capable of suggesting to a journalist, for a given event, the aspects still uncovered in news articles on which the readers focus their interest. The basic idea is to characterize an event according to the echo it receives in online news sources and associate it with the corresponding readers’ communicative and informative patterns, detected through the analysis of Twitter and Wikipedia, respectively. Our methodology temporally aligns the results of this analysis and recommends the concepts that emerge as topics of interest from Twitter and Wikipedia, either not covered or poorly covered in the published news articles

Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing

This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in order to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilingual users may serve an important function in diffusing information across different language editions of the encyclopedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds multilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual users than larger-sized editions. About a quarter of multilingual users always edit the same articles in multiple languages, while just over 40% of multilingual users edit different articles in different languages. When non-English users do edit a second language edition, that edition is most frequently English. Nonetheless, several regional and linguistic cross-editing patterns are also present