Web engineering:
Wikipedia
Irina Karpova
ikarpova@uni-koblenz.de
Universität Koblenz-Landau
29. Januar 2013
Overview
• Wikipedia as online community:
• Purpose
• Aims of Wikipedia
• Software
• Wiki Way of Web
• Guidelines and policies
• Wikipedians
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page screenshot taken on 22.01.13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About screenshot taken on 23.01.13
3
Online community
Communication among a group of people
‘‘who come together for a particular
purpose, and who are guided by policies
(including norms and rules) and supported
by software’’ (by Preece and MaloneyKrichmar (2005))
4
Model of Wikipedia development
by Patton (2002)
5
Visual representation of the elements of
Wikipedia as an online community
by Zhao
and
Bishop
(2011)
6
Overview
• Wikipedia as online community:
• Purpose
• Aims of Wikipedia
• Software
• Wiki Way of Web
• Guidelines and policies
• Wikipedians
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Indeed, the purpose
Ourofgoal
an with Wikipedia is to
encyclopedia is to COLLECT
create a FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA;
KNOWLEDGE disseminated
indeed, the LARGEST
around the globe;encyclopedia
TO SET
in history, both
forth its GENERAL SYSTEM
in terms
to of breadth and in
the men with whom we
terms
live,of depth. We also
and TRANSMIT IT to those
want
whoWikipedia to be a
will come after us [1]RELIABLE RESOURCE [1]
Denis Diderot [3]
Larry Sanger [2]
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http://www.oed.com/search?q=encyclopaedia screenshot taken on 22.01.13
Oxford English Dictionary:
A literary work containing extensive
information on all branches of knowledge,
usually arranged in alphabetical order [4]
Encyclopedia Britannica:
Reference work that contains information on
all branches of knowledge or that treats a
particular branch of knowledge in a
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comprehensive manner [5]
Aims of Wikipedia
 Gain all valuable knowledge in
comfortable reading form
 Provide free content via
GNU Free Documentation License
and Creative Commons
 Everyone could edit and create
articles
 Be neutral
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Overview
• Wikipedia as online community:
• Purpose
• Aims of Wikipedia
• Software
• Wiki Way of Web
• Guidelines and policies
• Wikipedians
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Wiki way of Web
„The simplest online
database that could
possibly work.
WIKI IS a piece of server
SOFTWARE that allows
users TO FREELY CREATE
AND EDIT WEB PAGE
content using any Web
Wikimedia
http://c2.com/w4/wikibase/?FrontPage
browser”[6]
foundations’
screenshot taken on 22.01.13
projects
Ward Cunningham,
inventor of the wiki [7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiNo
de screenshot taken on 22.01.13
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Wiki way of web: software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software screenshots taken on 22.01.13
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Wiki way of web: software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard/Ready_for_submission;
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vanilla_software&action=history;
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor:Test screenshots taken on 23.01.13
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Overview
• Wikipedia as online community:
• Purpose
• Aims of Wikipedia
• Software
• Wiki Way of Web
• Guidelines and policies
• Wikipedians
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Neutral point of view
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_antenna; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_valve; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Laden; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber Screenshots taken on 22.01.13
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Wikipedians: types
Regarding their user rights, there are such user groups [8]:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Administrators: 1,458
Account creators: 154
Autopatrollers: 2,871
Bots: 730
Bureaucrats: 35
Checkusers: 40
Confirmed users: 292
Edit filter managers: 158
File movers: 333
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Founders: 1
Importers: 1
IP block exemptions: 401
Oversighters: 39
Researchers: 8
Reviewers: 5,741
Rollbackers: 4,772
Stewards: 0
Transwiki importers: 0 17
Increase of polices’ descriptions
(from Butler, Joyce, Pike (2008))
Policy article
Copyright
What Wikipedia is not
Civility
Consensus
Deletion
Ignore all the rules
2001
341 words
541 words
1741 words
192 words
405 words
23 words
2008
3200 w.
5031 w.
2131 w.
2054 w.
2340 w.
16 w.
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Which user actions are regulated?
[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines (also on the next pages: screenshots taken on 25.01.13)
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Which user actions are regulated?
I disapprove!
Dear Sir, I think
your article is a
pure garbage!
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Which user actions are regulated?
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Simplified Wikipedia consensus flowchart
http://en.wikiped
ia.org/wiki/Wikip
edia:Consensus
screenshot taken
on 25.01.13
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Wikipedia vs. Britannica
Wiki:
162
errors
EB:
123
errors
[10]
D.I. Mendeleev, co-creator of the
Periodic System of Chemical Elements
13th or 14th child in the family?
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Power of community
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http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Saunders screenshots taken on 20.01.13 and 22.01.13
Links
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Purpose
2. Image source: http://www.geek.com/gearlog/images/larry-sanger-wikipedia.jpg
3. Image source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Portrait_de_Denis_Diderot_en_ro
be_de_chambre.jpg/220px-Portrait_de_Denis_Diderot_en_robe_de_chambre.jpg
4. http://www.oed.com/search?q=encyclopaedia
5. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/186603/encyclopaedia
6. http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
7. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ward_Cunningham_-_Commons-1.jpg
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#cite_note-2
9. Image source:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=24340.0;attach=52304;i
mage
10. Image source:
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/factotem/images/Mendeleev_home.jpg
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References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Preece, J., and Maloney-Krichmar, D. (2005). Online communities: Design, theory, and
practice. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 1.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/preece.html
Brian Butler, Elisabeth Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike. 2008. Don't look now, but we've created a
bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY,
USA, 1101-1110.
Xiaoli Zhao , M. J. Bishop (2011). Understanding and supporting online communities of
practice: lessons learned from Wikipedia.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11423-011-9204-7?LI=true#page-1
Todd Holloway, Miran Bozicevic, Katy Börner. 2007. Analyzing and visualizing the semantic
coverage of Wikipedia and its authors: Research Articles. Submitted to Complexity, Special
issue on Understanding Complex Systems. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0512085
Jim Giles. Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head. In: Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December
2005), DOI: 10.1038/438900a.
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