<b>Wikipedia's</b> Jimmy Wales on the big 'A' Word →
| Speaking during yesterday’s closing session at AdweekMedia’s Social Strategies Summit in New York, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales touted that his … See all stories on this topic » |
| Speaking during yesterday’s closing session at AdweekMedia’s Social Strategies Summit in New York, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales touted that his … See all stories on this topic » |
Taken together, Fitch believes that Proposition 101, Amendment 60, and Amendment 61 will dramatically limit the flexibility of state and local governments …
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The authors of this study use software which creates a visual representation of the amount of text changed on a Wikipedia article based on that article’s edit history by individual users over time. This software lets one easily see graphically the edit frequency, longevity and magnitude of an individual wiki site. Through this, they were able to see instances of vandalism being corrected, and negotiation between users in so called *edit wars*. An example of this view is provided below. Vandalism often looked like large explosion of information followed by a rapid deletion of erroneous information (when someone added a great deal of erroneous information). The converse was also visible of vandalism, when huge chunks of legitimate sections were deleted and rapidly reposted. Negation was visible through a zigzag pattern among two or more groups editing the same piece of information. Such visualizations will be helpful in analyzing candidate history. The creators of the program will need to be contacted to see how best to share this information. Also of note in the article, the authors postulate three possible root causes for the success of the Wikipedia community: The watch list, the Source Viegas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., & Kushal, D. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflit between authors with history flow visualization. *Proceedings of the CHI2004 Conference*, Vienna Austria, *6*(1), pp 557-581. Evolution on Wikipedia taken from: http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/gallery.htm
Spoerri sets out to answer a simple question: What’s popular in Wikipedia and Why. Through the site Wikichart, he examines the categorical content of the 100 most visited pages. In general, he finds that sites related to entertainment, politics + history, sexuality, and geography draw 80% of all traffic in the top 100. Further, he observes that the pages in this top 100 are rather stable with only 25 of the 100 pages on average being part of the top 100 for a single month of the study period. Finally, Spoerri discusses the relevance of placement in on a search engine’s results page. Specifically, most of these pages show in the top 3 results. Citing Sullivan (2006), he notes that these top 3 results are in the so called golden triangle of sites which is the most viewed places on a search page.
Spoerri, A. (2007). What is popular on Wikipedia and Why. First Monday, 12(3).
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Measuring Wikipedia
Voss (2005) explores various ways to quantifiably compare content across the various language Wikipedias using large data dumps picked up through SQ L coding—the requirements for which are part of the Wikipedia software license. Specifically he compares article count, authors, edits, link structure, content, and quality. While most of his analysis is rather straight forward, his discussion of edits bears special mention. He uses specific equations developed for genetic comparison to measure the distance between an articles original and edited point. This is an interesting way to measure the degree of change without actually having to read the article.
In addition, Voss has a rather comprehensive literature review, though he does not go into much depth. More reading is required to fully grasp his cited works.
Citation
Voss, J. (2005) Measuring Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the ISSI 2005 Conference.