All,
during the first RCom meeting we decided we would seek ways to highlight strategic research challenges at some major social computing conference.
John suggested we could organise "a panel at which some members of this committee might give a presentation on their views on high-value research contributions to Wikipedia". Others proposed a competition/data challenge to bootstrap research relevant to the strategic objectives of the Wikimedia community [1].
I wanted to bring to your attention the fact that two upcoming conferences, SocialCom [2] and WebScience [3], currently accept workshop proposals. KDD [4] is also soliciting workshop proposals but the deadline is very close (1 Feb). Calls for workshops at other major conferences this summer (HT, ICWSM, CHI, CSCW) are already closed. If we wish to organise a Wikimedia research session, the two conferences above would make great venues. I am not yet considering venues such as WikiSym, CollaborateCom, GROUP or CPOV that will take place later in Fall 2011, but these are obvious options as well.
Is anyone among us already planning to attend any of the above conferences?
Does anybody want to help draft some ideas for a possible workshop proposal?
Dario
[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities
[2] http://www.iisocialcom.org
[3] http://www.websci11.org
[4] http://www.kdd.org/kdd2011
Nicolas Jullien from Telecom Bretagne [1] informs me that they launched a survey to study French-speaking editor participation in Wikimedia projects and he asked me to forward the link:
http://www.marsouin.org/enquetes/wikipedia/
It's in French but it may be of interest to those of you working on the annual survey
Dario
[1] http://cccp-prosodie.org
Hi! In our page said that our next meeting will be middle of Febrary (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meeting_Planner). Shall we start difining a date now? An early planning might facilitate more people to organise in order to attend. Cheers! Mayo
«·´`·.(*·.¸(`·.¸ ¸.·´)¸.·*).·´`·»
«·´¨*·¸¸« Mayo Fuster Morell ».¸.·*¨`·»
«·´`·.(¸.·´(¸.·* *·.¸)`·.¸).·´`·»
Research Digital Commons Governance: http://www.onlinecreation.info
Ph.D European University Institute
Postdoctoral Researcher. Institute of Govern and Public Policies. Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Visiting scholar. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. Open University of Catalonia (UOC).
Visiting researcher (2008). School of information. University of California, Berkeley.
Phone Italy: 0039-3312805010 or 0039-0558409982
Phone Spanish State: 0034-648877748
E-mail: mayo.fuster(a)eui.eu
Skype: mayoneti
Postal address: EUI - Badia Fiesolana
Via dei Roccettini 9, I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) - Italy
________________________________________
From: rcom-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [rcom-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Dario Taraborelli [dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org]
Sent: 27 January 2011 17:23
To: The Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee mailing list
Subject: Re: [RCom-l] Annual survey & MediaWiki survey system vs. Subject recruitment procedure
Nicolas Jullien from Telecom Bretagne [1] informs me that they launched a survey to study French-speaking editor participation in Wikimedia projects and he asked me to forward the link:
http://www.marsouin.org/enquetes/wikipedia/
It's in French but it may be of interest to those of you working on the annual survey
Dario
[1] http://cccp-prosodie.org
_______________________________________________
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RCom-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
Since I imagine Diversity being a core desiderata for many of the researchers on the list, I bluntly misuse this list to spread the word.
Please feel free to forward this message to further researchers and lists who might be interested. The WWW is the prime conference on all things Web, and we are very happy to have a workshop there on this topic.
Cheers,
Denny
Call for Papers for
DiversiWeb 2011
First International Workshop on Knowledge Diversity on the Web
Workshop at WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India
March 28 or 29 (TBD), 2011
Supported by the EU FP7 projects RENDER and Living Knowledge
<http://render-project.eu/diversiweb-2011/>
Almost 20 years after its introduction, the Web provides a platform for the publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions, viewpoints, mindsets and backgrounds. The success of the Web can be attributed to several factors, most notably to its principled scalable design, but also to a number of subsequent ICT developments such as smart user-generated content, mobile devices, and most recently cloud computing.
The first two of these have dramatically lowered the last barriers of entry when it comes to producing and consuming information online, leading to an unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. They are responsible for hundreds of millions of users all over the globe creating high-quality encyclopedias, publishing Terabytes of multimedia content, contributing to world-class software, and lively taking part in defining the agenda of many aspects of our society by raising their voices, and publicly expressing and sharing their ideas, viewpoints, and resources.
The other side of the coin in this unique success story is, nevertheless, the great challenges associated with managing the sheer amounts of information continuously being published online, whilst allowing for purposeful use, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through global-scale collaboration. In this context, diversity includes different opinions, sentiments, preferences, or worldviews that are reflected in the way information is expressed on the Web. These challenges are still to be solved at many levels, from the infrastructure to store and access the information, through the methods and techniques to make sense out of it, to the paradigms underlying the processes of Web-based information provision and consumption.
As an example, when searching for blog posts, state-of-the-art technology – be that popularity-based algorithms, recommendation engines or collaborative filters – tends to return either the most popular posts, or those which correspond with a personal profile and therefore with the known opinions and tastes of the reader. Alternative points of view, and new unexpected content, are not taken into account as they are not highly ranked, and posts expressing different opinions are sometimes even discarded.
This behavior has particularly negative consequences when dealing with information that is expected and intended to be subject to diverse opinion – as is the case with news reports, ratings of products or media content, customer reviews, or any other type of subjective assessment. The same negative effects apply in a community-driven environment that is designed for collaboration – the most obvious example here being Wikipedia and the blogosphere. The information diversity exposed in such an environment, impressive both with respect to scale and the richness of opinions and viewpoints expressed, cannot be handled without adequate computer support in an economically feasible manner. In the long run, maintaining the current state-of-affairs will change the ways and the extent to which people are informed (or not) on a particular topic, tremendously influencing how they look into that topic, what they find about it and what they think about it.
On top of all this, it is meanwhile acknowledged that the current state of affairs hampers true collaboration. Wikipedia is a tremendous success, but it is also a largely meritocratic system with a decreasing number of active contributors, whereas the blogosphere has to deal with the limited attention of the blog authors. What is needed are novel concepts, methods and tools that allow humans and machines to leverage the huge amounts of information created by a community, based on interaction models that support expressing, communicating and reasoning about divergent models simultaneously. This would not only enhance true collaboration, but would also significantly improve various aspects of the information management life cycle, thus addressing information overload in sectors which rely on opinions-driven information sources and mass participation – news, ratings, reviews, and social and information sharing portals of any kind.
== Goal of the workshop ==
The overall aim of this workshop is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss their ideas related to the challenges posed by diversity on the Web. We aim to address a wide array of interdisciplinary questions, which need to be tackled in order to preserve the fragile balance between a world that is continually converging and growing together, the rich diversity of the global society, and the dangers of fragmentation and splintering. This includes but is not limited to questions such as ‘How to model diversity?’, ‘How to discover bias and opinion in blog posts, tweets, forum items, wiki edits, etc.?’, ‘How to rank, aggregate, summarize, and exploit information in a diversity-aware manner?’, ‘What are the applications of diversity-rich information sources?’, ‘How can we use diversity as an asset instead of regarding it as a barrier?’.
== Topics ==
In particular we welcome submissions that
* Analyze the capabilities of current information management models, algorithms and technologies to leverage knowledge diversity,
* Extend existing models, methods, techniques and tools to accommodate the requirements arising from paying a proper account to diversity-expressed information sources and communication and collaboration environments characterized by a rich variety of opinions and viewpoints.
* Discuss the foundations of knowledge diversity on the Web and propose alternative paradigms,
* Propose novel evaluation strategies, methods and techniques to assess the impact of diversity-minded information management.
Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
* Risks and advantages of diversity and diversification on the Web
* Facets of knowledge diversity and conceptual and formal models for representing and understanding diversity
* Discovery and mining of corpora for diversity-related information
* Use of Natural Language Processing techniques for diversity mining
* Classifying Web 2.0 content items such as blog posts, videos, tweets, and wiki-edits by their biases
* Usage and benefits of diversity in the corporate context, e.g. in order to understand feedback and communication with the customer
* Enabling or improving communication and collaboration over barriers induced by diversity
* Extensions to Web applications taking diversity into account
* Exposing and explaining diversity to end users
* User experiences avoiding the radicalization of groups by exposing them to alternatives
* User interfaces allowing the explicit annotation of content with diversity markers
* Studies on the acceptance by end-users of diversified applications.
We explicitly invite experience reports on topics related of diversity from the Web as it is used in India.
== Submissions ==
We aim at four different kind of submission:
(1) research papers of the length of 8 pages presenting mature work, prototypes and methodologies,
(2) position papers of the length of 4 pages presenting early work and elaborated ideas,
(3) demo outlines of the length of 2 pages, and
(4) experience reports of up to 6 pages about dealing and managing with diversity, especially within the usage of the Web in India.
Submission format is the same as for WWW 2011 (i.e. ACM style).
Selected papers will be invited for a special issue of a journal or as bookchapters, pending negotiations.
Submissions can be submitted via EasyChair at
<https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=diversiweb2011>
== Important dates ==
Submission deadline:
* Submission deadline: 11th February, 2011
* Notification of acceptance: 7th March, 2011
Camera ready versions of accepted papers: 19th March, 2011
Workshop date: 28th or 29th March, 2011 (TBD)
== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Devika P. Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India
* Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Contact us at <diversiweb(a)lists.kit.edu>
You may have seen the recent Chronicle piece by Casper Grathwohl advocating for a stronger cooperation between Wikipedia and the scholarly community. I find the analysis of the current Wikipedia as "the highest layer without formal vetting" very timely and spot-on ("in this unique role, it serves as an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web").
Wikimedia is currently exploring several initiatives and projects related to getting experts/academics involved in quality assessment of Wikipedia articles. Those of you (in particular Daniel, Giota, WereSpielChequers) who are interested in this topic should check out this summary of current initiatives and objectives that Erik just posted:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Expert_review
The first short-term objective in the Expert Involvement area of interest will be the AcaWP survey, but please let me know if you have ideas on other possible ways in which RCom may participate in this initiative.
Best,
Dario
FYI – the project just went live
Dario
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia <giovanni.luca.ciampaglia(a)usi.ch>
> Date: 10 January 2011 13:08:13 GMT
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] ANN: notabilia.net: Visualizing deletion decisions on Wikipedia
> Reply-To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; it; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.7
>
> Hello all,
> It seems community discussions like those for AfDs or admin elections
> have received some attention in the literature recently.
> Together with Dario Taraborelli and Moritz Stefaner we wanted to get a
> better perspective on them and tried to visualize them. We just put
> online today a visualization of the longest AfD discussions on the
> English Wikipedia.
>
> Check it out: http://notabilia.net
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Giovanni L. Ciampaglia
> PhD Student
> University of Lugano, MACS Lab
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l