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WikiSim: simulating knowledge collection and curation in structured wikis

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The aim of this work is to model quantitatively one of the main properties of wikis: how high quality knowledge can emerge from the individual work of independent volunteers. The approach chosen is to simulate knowledge collection and curation in wikis.
The basic model represents the wiki as a set of of true/false values, added and edited at each simulation round by software agents (users) following a fixed set of rules. The resulting WikiSim simulations already manage to reach distributions of edits and user contributions very close to those reported for Wikipedia. WikiSim can also span conditions not easily measurable in real-life wikis, such as the impact of various amounts of user mistakes.
WikiSim could be extended to model wiki software features, such as discussion pages and watch lists, while monitoring the impact they have on user actions and consensus, and their effect on knowledge quality. The method could also be used to compare wikis with other curation scenarios based on centralised editing by experts. The future challenges for WikiSim will be to find appropriate ways to evaluate and validate the models and to keep them simple while still capturing relevant properties of wiki systems.

References

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C. Anderson. The Long Tail. Hyperion, 2006.
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S. Auer, S. Dietzold, and T. Riechert. Ontowiki a tool for social, semantic collaboration. In The Semantic Web - ISWC 2006, volume 4273/2006, pages 736--749.
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A. Capocci, V. D. P. Servedio, F. Colaiori, L. S. Buriol, D. Donato, S. Leonardi, and G. Caldarelli. Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the internet encyclopedia wikipedia. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys, 74(3 Pt 2):036116, Sep 2006.
[4]
F. Ortega and J. M. G. Barahona. Quantitative analysis of the wikipedia community of users. In Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis, pages 75--86, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2007. ACM.
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J. Voss. Measuring wikipedia. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI 2005), 2005.

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis
September 2008
219 pages
ISBN:9781605581286
DOI:10.1145/1822258

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  • University of Porto

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. wiki simulation
  2. wikis

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  • Research-article

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WikiSym08
Sponsor:
WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis
September 8 - 10, 2008
Porto, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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