I recently found that a Wikipedia-related presentation of mine in a
sociological conference (ASA in SF - let me know if anybody else is
going there) got shifted to a Second Life track (it was supposed to be
about online communities in general, but mysterious are the ways of
conference and panel organizers).
So I thought I should at least pay a token attention to SL, and I
thought about a brief numerical comparison. It is possible to consider
the number of total registered accounts (en-Wiki 2009: ~10 mil, other
Wikimedia Foundation projects 2009: ~10 mil, Second Life 2008: ~15 mil)
but I run into a problem trying to get a wiki-equivalent of
"average/highest number of active editors" (SL in early 2008: ~40,000 -
but that's just for people logged in, doesn't say anything about their
activity - one can leave a SL client running in the background... just
like one can be logged in to Wikipedia for weeks).
What about Wiki? After some thought and discussion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Recent_changes_patrol#How_many_…
and a useful tool that was designed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Piotrus#RC_active_users
I begun compiling some stats based on a number of unique editors listed
at RC page. There is still not enough data to see a clear trend, but
numbers seem roughly consistent at about 800 registered users / 400 ips
editing en-Wikipedia per hour and 90/30 per 5 minute periods.
As for Alexa traffic rank, SL is at megere ~4000, compared to our Top
10, but that's of course reflects the fact that Wikipedia is useful for
non-logged in users as well.
I wonder if we can indeed answer whether Wikipedia or SL is more
popular? Wikipedia is more popular in general, but for logged in
(registered) users, which one would be?
--
Piotr Konieczny
"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in
theory."
Dear all,
I would like to draw your attention to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_academic_studies
Our older members may be familiar with it, but it may be a useful
resource for the new ones. And this resource is in need of our assistance!
A year ago I've done my best to update this article, and I am pretty
confident it lists all Wikipedia-related articles (presented or
published in journals) up to mid-2008. Since then, I have not been
updating it as comprehensively, and the previously nearly exponential
trend in Wikipedia-related article growth seems to have leveled off - or
as I expect, this page is simply missing about half (or more?) of
Wikipedia-related articles published/presented since mid-2008.
If you know of any articles that are missing from that page, please
consider updating it. I think it is the most comprehensive,
user-friendly and (not the least important)
not-in-danger-of-ever-going-down resource listing research in our
nascent field, but it does rely, as any wiki page, on a collaborative
effort to maintain it :)
--
Piotr Konieczny
"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in
theory."
ACL/IJCNLP-2009 Workshop
"The People's Web meets NLP:
Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources"
Co-located with Joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International
Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian
Federation of Natural Language Processing
Singapore
August 7th, 2009
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/acl-ijcnlp-2009-workshop/
LIST OF ACCEPTED PAPERS
* A Novel Approach to Automatic Gazetteer Generation using Wikipedia
Ziqi Zhang and Jose Iria
* Named Entity Recognition in Wikipedia
Dominic Balasuriya, Nicky Ringland, Joel Nothman, Tara Murphy and
James R. Curran
* Wiktionary for Natural Language Processing: Methodology and Limitations
Emmanuel Navarro, Franck Sajous, Bruno Gaume, Laurent Prévot,
ShuKai Hsieh, Ivy Kuo, Pierre Magistry and Chu-Ren Huang
* Using the Wiktionary Graph Structure for Synonym Detection
Timothy Weale, Chris Brew and Eric Fosler-Lussier
* Automatic Content-Based Categorization of Wikipedia Articles
Zeno Gantner and Lars Schmidt-Thieme
* Evaluating a Statistical CCG Parser on Wikipedia
Matthew Honnibal, Joel Nothman and James R. Curran
* Construction of Disambiguated Folksonomy Ontologies Using Wikipedia
Noriko Tomuro and Andriy Shepitsen
* Acquiring High Quality Non-Expert Knowledge from On-Demand Workforce
Donghui Feng, Sveva Besana and Remi Zajac
* Constructing an Anaphorically Annotated Corpus with Non-Experts:
Assessing the Quality of Collaborative Annotations
Jon Chamberlain, Udo Kruschwitz and Massimo Poesio
INVITED TALK
Speaker: Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas
Title: Large Scale Semantic Annotations Using Encyclopedic Knowledge
Abstract:
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has grown to become one of the
largest online repositories of encyclopedic knowledge, with millions of
articles available for a large number of languages. In fact, Wikipedia
editions are available for more than 200 languages, with a number of
entries varying from a few pages to more than one million articles per
language.
In this talk, I will describe the use of Wikipedia as a source of
linguistic evidence for large scale semantic annotations. In particular,
I will show how this online encyclopedia can be used to achieve
state-of-the-art results on two text processing tasks: automatic keyword
extraction and word sense disambiguation. I will also show how the two
methods can be combined into a system able to automatically enrich a text
with links to encyclopedic knowledge. Given an input document, the system
identifies the important concepts in the text and automatically links
these concepts to the corresponding Wikipedia pages. Evaluations of the
system showed that the automatic annotations are reliable and hardly
distinguishable from manual annotations. Additionally, an evaluation of
the system in an educational environment showed that the availability of
encyclopedic knowledge within easy reach of a learner can improve both
the quality of the knowledge acquired and the time needed to obtain
such knowledge.
Short bio:
Rada Mihalcea is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
University of North Texas. Her research interests are in lexical semantics,
graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and multilingual
natural language processing. During 2004-2007, she acted as the president
of the ACL Special Group on the Lexicon, and she serves or has served on
the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language
Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, and Research in
Language in Computation. She is the recipient of a National Science
Foundation CAREER award.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, online resources collaboratively constructed by ordinary
users on the Web have considerably influenced the NLP community. In many
works, they have been used as a substitute for conventional semantic
resources and as semantically structured corpora with great success.
While conventional resources such as WordNet are developed by trained
linguists [1], online semantic resources can now be automatically
extracted from the content collaboratively created by the users [2].
Thereby, the knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and coverage problems
pertinent to conventional lexical semantic resources can be overcome.
The resource that has gained the greatest popularity in this respect
so far is Wikipedia. However, other resources recently discovered in
NLP, such as folksonomies, the multilingual collaboratively
constructed dictionary Wiktionary, or Q&A sites like WikiAnswers or
Yahoo! Answers are also very promising. Moreover, new wiki-based
platforms such as Citizendium or Knol have recently emerged that
offer features distinct from Wikipedia and are of high potential
in terms of their use in NLP.
The benefits of using Web-based resources come along with new
challenges, such as the interoperability with existing resources and
the quality of the knowledge represented. As collaboratively created
resources lack editorial control, they are typically incomplete. For
the interoperability with conventional resources, the mappings have
to be investigated. The quality of collaboratively constructed
resources is questioned in many cases, and the information extraction
remains a complicated task due to the incompleteness and semi-
structuredness of the content. Therefore, the research community has
begun to develop and provide tools for accessing collaboratively
constructed resources [2,5].
The above listed challenges actually present a chance for NLP
techniques to improve the quality of Web-based semantic resources.
Researchers have therefore proposed techniques for link prediction [3]
or information extraction [4] that can be used to guide the "crowds"
to construct resources that are better suited for being used in NLP
in return.
[1] Christiane Fellbaum
WordNet An Electronic Lexical Database.
MIT press, 1998.
[2] Torsten Zesch, Christof Mueller and Iryna Gurevych
Extracting Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Wikipedia and Wiktionary
Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC), 2008.
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/jwpl/http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/jwktl/
[3] Rada Mihalcea and Andras Csomai
Wikify!: Linking Documents to Encyclopedic Knowledge.
Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management, CIKM 2007.
[4] Daniel S. Weld et al.
Intelligence in Wikipedia.
Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2008.
[5] Kotaro Nakayama et al.
Wikipedia Mining - Wikipedia as a Corpus for Knowledge Extraction.
Proceedings of the Annual Wikipedia Conference (Wikimania), 2008.
http://wikipedia-lab.org/en/index.php
TOPICS
The workshop will bring together researchers from both worlds: those
using collaboratively created resources in NLP applications such as
information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction,
and those using NLP applications for improving the resources or
extracting different types of semantic information from them. Hopefully,
this will turn into a feedback loop, where NLP techniques improved by
collaboratively constructed resources are used to improve the resources
in exchange.
ORGANIZERS
Iryna Gurevych
Torsten Zesch
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Delphine Bernhard Technische Universiaet Darmstadt
Paul Buitelaar DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway
Razvan Bunescu University of Texas at Austin
Pablo Castells Universidad Autononoma de Madrid
Philipp Cimiano Karlsruhe University
Irene Cramer Dortmund University of Technology
Andras Csomai Google Inc.
Ernesto De Luca University of Magdeburg
Roxana Girju University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Andreas Hotho University of Kassel
Graeme Hirst University of Toronto
Ed Hovy University of Southern California
Jussi Karlgren Swedish Institute of Computer Science
Boris Katz Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Adam Kilgarriff Lexical Computing Ltd
Chin-Yew Lin Microsoft Research
James Martin University of Colorado Boulder
Olena Medelyan University of Waikato
David Milne University of Waikato
Saif Mohammad University of Maryland
Dan Moldovan University of Texas at Dallas
Kotaro Nakayama University of Tokyo
Ani Nenkova University of Pennsylvania
Guenter Neumann DFKI Saarbruecken
Maarten de Rijke University of Amsterdam
Magnus Sahlgren Swedish Institute of Computer Science
Manfred Stede Potsdam University
Benno Stein Bauhaus University Weimar
Tonio Wandmacher University of Osnabrueck
Rene Witte Concordia University Montreal
Hans-Peter Zorn European Media Lab, Heidelberg
Dear all,
I just learned of a new interesting conference - please find more info
below.
--
Piotr Konieczny
"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in
theory."
CPOV - Critical Point Of View : WikiWars
(Bangalore, 12-13 January 2010)
The Wikimedia Foundation has recently employed its first research
analyst and provides spaces for “Wikipediology”, including projects such
as the Wiki Project on vandalism studies. Nonetheless, critical
Wikipedia research should also be done outside the self-reflexivity of
the Wikimedia Foundation and its community. There is an urgent need for
quantitative and qualitative research from an Humanities and Arts
perspective that could benefit both the wider user base and the active
Wikipedia community itself.
The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute
of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to
produce a critical reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia
Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that
bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and
stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around
Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a reader
that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.
The first conference to be held in Bangalore on 12-13 January 2010,
called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics,
practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their
experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories
about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides
an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit
battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view.
WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different
stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority,
verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls
for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical
dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.
The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences,
experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:
Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical
approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance
of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production
systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore
and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document
Wikipedia based art practices or debates
Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that
focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of
neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on
the Wikipedia
Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic
practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage,
production and participation on the Wikipedia
Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western
material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women,
non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on
Wikipedia etc.
The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the
Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and
ideas
Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching
resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the
knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities
around the Wikipedia
Last date for submitting note of interest and funding options : 31
August 2009
How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following
information by email to infowiki(a)cis-india.org by the 31 August 2009.
1. A note of interest (450 700 words) detailing your ideas and
possible contribution
2. Your updated resume
3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed
papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)
For the detail call for participation see:
http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars
For more information about the broader research network cpov see:
http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars
Research and editorial group: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer
(Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Sunil Abraham (Bangalore),
Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nishant Shah (Bangalore).--------
Diese Nachricht wurde verschickt ueber die Mailingliste Bewegungsforschung.
Zum an- oder abmelden gehe auf die Seite
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/bewegungsforschung
Dear colleagues
In early June our team from the Center for Computer Education of the
University of Teacher Education Bern in Switzerland released the online tool
Wikibu:
www.wikibu.ch
The main goal of Wikibu is sensitization of scholars to a considered use of
Wikipedia. Wikibu attempts to do this with the following means:
- Wikibu-Points should provide a rough indication of the reliability of an
article. The Wikibu-Points are solely based on statistical criteria and
represents only probabilities. They might be compared to black ice caution
labels. On road sites with such a label there is a higher risk of black ice.
But there must not in fact be black ice there. And that doesn't mean, that
there is no black ice on road sites without such a label.
- Wikibu criteria such as number of visitors or number of references (in
relation to the length of the article) should provide ideas how users
themselves could evaluate the content critically.
- Warning notices should motivate to use meta information such as discussion
pages and version histories. They point to current discussions or a series
of edits.
- A concrete school class setting should demonstrate, how information
literacy regarding Wikipedia could be enhanced in schools and which role
Wikibu thereby could play.
For the present, Wikibu is only available for the german Wikipedia. The next
step will be the evaluation of the Wikibu-Points.
Nando Stoecklin
http://www.phbern.ch/mitarbeitende/nando-stoecklin/