Collaborative Writing: Wiki and Wikipedia

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Collaborative Writing Wiki and Wikipedia

• Keshava P Subramanya (keshava_at_cs.ucsb.edu)
• Roopa Kannan (roopakannan_at_cs.ucsb.edu)

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Todays Talk

• Quick introduction about the wiki and
  collaborative writing idea.
• Wikipedia
• Two views of how Wikipedia works
• Criticisms
• Details about the Community
• Future

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What is collaborative writing?

• Projects where written works are created by
  multiple people together (collaboratively) rather
  than individually
• Some projects are overseen by an editor or
  editorial team
• Many grow without any top-down oversight.

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Computer based collaborative writing

• Revision control software providing check-in/out
• ( example subversion, cvs )
• Enterprise information portal, Content management
  system
• SharePoint
• Wikis

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Some Collab projects

• Novel Twists Online collaborative novel where
  each of the 150 pages is written one at a time by
  a different person.
• co-write.me.uk
• The Linux documentation project
• OOoAuthors

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What is a Wiki

• Essentially a dynamic, collectively authored set
  of web pages.
• Invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham to facilitate
  online collaboration about programming and design
  best practices.
• Evolved by the early 2000s into a way to
  facilitate all kinds of online collaboration.

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Wiki Definition

• A wiki (according to Ward Cunningham) is a type
  of website that allows users to add and edit
  content and is especially suited for constructive
  collaborative authoring.
• In essence, a wiki is a simplification of the
  process of creating HTML pages combined with a
  system that records each individual change that
  occurs over time, so that at any time, a page can
  be reverted to any of its previous states.

As defined in Wikipedia.
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How the Wiki Got Its Name

• Wiki is the Hawaiian word meaning quick,
  fast, or to hasten.
• Wiki-Wiki is the name of the bus line in the
  Honolulu International Airport.

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How the Wiki Got Its Name
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How the Wiki Got Its Name
Wiki-wiki to the beach. - Elvis Presley (as
Chad Gates) in the movie Blue Hawaii (1961). The
line was said with a snap of the fingers.
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Some more
Wiki (according to UIC Prof. Steve
Jones) Web-based Interactive Kollaborative
(collaborative) Iterative Wiki is sometimes
interpreted as the backronym for What I Know
Is, which describes the knowledge contribution,
storage and exchange function.
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More Uses for a Wiki

• 100 things to do before you die
• The worlds largest How-To manual wikiHow
• Things to do in Seattle
• World-wide travel guide wikitravel.org
• Everything you want to know about VoIP
• All about the flu Flu Wiki

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Free Hosting of Wikis

• wikihost.org
• free-wiki-hosting.com
• wikicities.com
• educational.blogs.com
• duckcomputing.com
• pbwiki.com
• wikispaces.com

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What is Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopaedia
  written by thousands of volunteers in many
  languages
• Free license allows others to freely copy,
  redistribute, and modify work commercially or
  non-commercially
• Founded January 15, 2001
• Run by the wikimedia foundation.
• wikipedia.org

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What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

• Non-profit foundation
• Its 4th Quarter 2005 costs were 321,000 USD,
  with hardware making up almost 60 of the budget
  
• Where does it get the money ?
• Aim to distribute a free encyclopaedia to every
  single person on the planet in their own language
• Wikipedia and its sister projects
• wikimediafoundation.org

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Advantages of Freely Licensed Content

• GNU Free Documentation Licence
• Remains non-proprietary
• Enhances the popularity of Wikipedia
• Decreases individual sense of ownership
• Increases a sense of shared ownership

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Free Software

• MediaWiki is GPL
• Uses all free software on the website
• GNU/Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• Php

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How big is Wikipedia?

• English Wikipedia is largest and has over 260
  million words
• English Wikipedia larger than Britannica and
  Microsoft Encarta combined
• In 15 months the publicly distributed compressed
  database dumps may reach 1 terabyte total size

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How big is Wikipedia Globally?

• Total more than 5 million articles!
• English 1,412,000 articles
• German 172,000 articles
• Japanese 87,000 articles
• French 66,000 articles
• Swedish 53,000 articles
• Over 5 million across 250 languages
• 19 with gt10,000. 52 with gt1000
• (statistics could be dated)

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How popular is Wikipedia?

• According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia (ranked 20th)
  is more popular than the websites of
• IBM
• Paypal
• Open Directory Project
• Geocities
• 400 Million page views monthly

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Wikipedia vs. Britannica

• AP article on CNN website

This study was challenged by Encyclopædia
Britannica, who described it as "fatally flawed.
source www.wikipedia.org
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Wikimedia Projects

• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary
• Wikibooks
• Wikiquote
• Wikispecies
• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikinews

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Wikinews

• Community edited news along the same principles
  of Wikipedia
• Fairly new project
• Aim of the project
• wikinews.org

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Wikimedias Hardware

• 30 servers
• Squid caching servers in front to serve cached
  objects quickly
• Apache/PHP webservers in the middle
• Database backend (MySql)

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MediaWiki

• MediaWiki is one of many wiki engines
• Collaborative software that allows users to add
  or edit content
• Primarily developed for Wikipedia from 2002
  onwards
• Scalable and multilingual
• Free license

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MediaWiki features

• Quality control features (versioning)
• Editing features (simple markup)
• Community features (talk pages, profiles, access
  levels)

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Page History
DEMO
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Interlanguage linking
DEMO
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Criticism Workshop ?

• Hints
• Can Wikipedia Content Be Trusted?
• Systematic bias
• Reliability of Information
• Technology requirement

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Can Wikipedia Content Be Trusted?

• Review processes
• Partly post-moderation, partly reactive
  moderation
• Linking to particular revisions
• Development of a stable version
• Free license allows you to modify it

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Reliability of Information

• Criticism
• The community contribution approach allows for
  too much false information.
• Without an expert background a person can not
  present an unbiased, factual position.

• Rebuttal
• The open source approach allows for new
  information to be added on a daily basis.
• The articles that exist on Wikipedia are a group
  effort where any wrong information can be edited.
• The group editing also lets people combine
  information to get a broad background.

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Reliability of Information

• Criticism
• The large quantity of daily information added
  prevents proper fact checking.
• The daily edits allow too many mistakes to go
  unnoticed or be reintroduced.

• Rebuttal
• Wikipedia does maintain a staff whose sole
  purpose is to review and edit articles.
• Each day articles are viewed by thousands of
  people, any one person can implement changes to
  correct mistakes.
• Printed encyclopedias can not fix errors once
  released, while Wikipedia is always able to make
  corrections.

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Systematic Bias

• Criticism
• Systematic bias exposes WIkipedia to unbalanced
  amounts of information.
• People are more likely to write about topics that
  interest them as opposed to more historically
  significant topics.

• Rebuttal
• Past requests for information have been met with
  quick action.
• These responses have created huge increases in
  the amount of coverage of topics.
• Wikipedia also includes a inquiry page. Any
  topic can be requested and the Wiki community is
  quick to respond.

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Technology Requirements

• Criticism
• Wikipedia faces technology constraints as an
  online encyclopedia.
• A reader must have Internet access at all times.
• The possibility of tech failure on the
  Wikipedias end also presents problems.

• Rebuttal
• The technology constraints constantly decrease as
  the world becomes more advanced.
• The student population has almost 100 Internet
  access due to school resources and class
  requirements.

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Latest Information

• Wikipedia is built on the belief that
  collaboration among users will improve articles
  over time.
• The software of Wikipedia allows for rapid
  updating of existing articles, as well as
  constant introduction of new topics.

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Quick Vandalism Response

• Most vandalisms on Wikipedia are reverted within
  five minutes.
• There is a record of change made to every page
  and Wikipedia volunteers watch the list of recent
  changes.
• If a user constantly vandalizes pages of
  Wikipedia, individuals can be blocked and pages
  can be locked down.

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Neutral Point of View

• Three sides to everything, your version, my
  version, and the truth
• Editors are asked to maintain a neutral point of
  view when writing for Wikipedia.
• When editing wars break out and neutral points of
  view are not maintained, Wikipedia volunteers
  usually remove the information posted.

Click here
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Two Views of Wikipedia

• Emergent
• Community of thoughtful users

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Emergent

• Thousands of individual users who dont know each
  other each contribute a little bit
• Out of this emerges a coherent body of work

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A Community?
Berlin
London
Genoa
A dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers who
know each other and work to guarantee the quality
and integrity of the content.
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Implications

• Emergent Model
• Need reputation mechanisms like Ebay, Slashdot
• Users are tiny, have no power

• Community Model
• Reputation is a natural outcome of human
  interactions
• Users are powerful, must be respected

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80/10 Rule

• Counting only logged in users, and even excluding
  some prominent approved bot users
• 10 percent of all users make 80 of all edits
• 5 percent of all users make 66 of edits
• Half of all edits are made by just 2 1/2 percent
  of all users

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Edits by Anons

• Controversial, intriguing
• Yes, you can edit this page
• Without logging in!
• Anonymous ip numbers can edit Wikipedia
• But these edits make up a total of around 18 of
  all edits, with some evidence of a downward trend
  over time

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Edits across namespaces

• Articles 85
• Talk pages 8
• User Page 3
• User Talk Pages 4
• These percentages are stable in 2003
• And 2004

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Wikipedia is a community

• How does it work?
• Who are the users?
• How do they self-regulate?

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Many types of users

• As in any society, there are many types of people
  -- these types are reflected in editing patterns
• Individual users may not fit cleanly into a
  single type, but thinking about editing patterns
  is a helpful way to understand the community

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Broad Types

• Worker Bees, POV pushers
• Police, Judges
• Controversy lovers - Moths
• Pseudo-users - Sock puppets, Vandals
• Extra-Wiki - Mailing list, IRC, Board activities,
  Developers

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Bees

• The most important users at Wikipedia
• But may go unnoticed unless special attention is
  given
• Generalists
• Specialists
• Proof-readers

Question What attracts the bees??
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Sock Puppet

• Not all sock puppets are bad
• Privacy
• The chance to start over
• But when used wrongly, is one of the worst
  offenses

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Moth

• Drawn to flames
• Not necessarily a bad thing - some people thrive
  on controversy

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Vandal

• Less of a problem for the community than most
  people assume
• Vandalism is easy to revert, and blocking vandals
  (temporarily) slows them down and takes the fun
  away

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Outside the Wiki

• Developers - coders and system admins
• IRC Channels
• Mailing lists

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Wikipedia Governance

• A confusing but workable mix of
• Consensus
• Democracy
• Aristocracy
• Monarchy

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Community Challenges

• How can such a large community scale?
• Through software features
• Through policy (mediation, arbitration)
• Through an atmosphere of love and respect

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Community Self-Regulation

• Quality control features recent changes,
  watchlists, related changes, page histories, user
  contributions lists
• Community features talk pages, user profiles,
  access levels, user-to-user email, message
  notification.

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International Community

• Interlanguage linking of articles
• Choice of language interface
• Global newsletter Quarto
• Translation of the week

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Conclusion

• Wikipedia is a community
• Automated and artificial Slashdot-style
  reputation metrics are not needed and may not be
  desirable
• Achieving quality levels equalling or exceeding
  traditional publishing models can be expected
  without emergent magic

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Credits

• http//www.wikipedia.org and related sites
• Some slides adapted from
• Jimmy Wales President, Wikimedia Foundation
  Wikipedia Founder
• Prof. Burks Oakley II Prof of E.C.E University of
  Illinois