Hi everyone,
We are delighted to announce that Wiki Workshop 2020 will be held in
Taipei on April 20 or 21, 2020 (the date to be finalized soon) and as
part of the Web Conference 2020 [1]. In the past years, Wiki Workshop
has traveled to Oxford, Montreal, Cologne, Perth, Lyon, and San
Francisco.
You can read more about the call for papers and the workshops at
http://wikiworkshop.org/2020/#call. Please note that the deadline for
the submissions to be considered for proceedings is January 17. All
other submissions should be received by February 21.
If you have questions about the workshop, please let us know on this
list or at wikiworkshop(a)googlegroups.com.
Looking forward to seeing you in Taipei.
Best,
Miriam Redi, Wikimedia Foundation
Bob West, EPFL
Leila Zia, Wikimedia Foundation
[1] https://www2020.thewebconf.org/
Hi all,
Summary: You can read Research Report No 1 which is an overview of
what the Research team [1] at Wikimedia Foundation has been busy with
in the past six months and what's ahead of us at
https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html . You can even do
cmd/ctrl+p and download the report as pdf. I have signed up to send
out this report twice a year, in December and June.
==Purpose==
Communicating in written with you on a biannual basis about what we
are working on and what's in our minds when it comes to research on or
about Wikimedia projects.
==Motivation==
* We receive emails from those of you in the community and external
researchers asking about what we're working on now and what's ahead of
us in the next 6 months to a year. I read this as there is a need for
better/more communication about what we do.
* We do write grant reports for organizations who give grants to
Wikimedia Foundation. I have now been involved in a few of them for
our team and I see them as really nice summaries of what's going on in
a team and what's ahead. I felt it's a loss to not tell a similar
story to the public. I talked with Jonathan Curiel, Senior Development
Communications Manager at Wikimedia Foundation, and he was up for
doing this together.
==Scope==
The focus is on our team, what's in our minds, what we do, and some of
the important trends or events we're part of or we think we should be
aware of. The report has a narrow scope compared to the wealth of work
that is being done in the Wikimedia Movement. For a broader scope, I
continue to recommend efforts such as
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter .
Last but not least: this is an experiment. I am committed to do it for
a few times and we assess the usefulness of it then. If you have
feedback, please let me know. (I will be out of office for a good part
of the holidays ahead. If you don't hear back from me immediately, I
will come back to you in the second week of January.)
Best,
Leila
[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
We, the Research team at Wikimedia Foundation, have received some requests
over the past months for making ourselves more available to answer some of
the research questions that you as Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates' staff,
and researchers face in your projects and initiatives. Starting January
2020, we will experiment with monthly office hours organized jointly by our
team and the Analytics team where you can join us and direct your questions
to us. We will revisit this experiment in June 2020 to assess whether to
continue it or not.
The scope
We encourage you to attend the office hour if you have research related
questions. These can be questions about our teams, our projects, or more
importantly questions about your projects or ideas that we can support you
with during the office hours. You can also ask us questions about how to
use a specific dataset available to you, to answer a question you have, or
some other question. Note that the purpose of the office hours is to answer
your questions during the dedicated time of the office hour. Questions that
may require many hours of back-and-forth between our team and you are not
suited for this forum. For these bigger questions, however, we are happy to
brainstorm with you in the office hour and point you to some good
directions to explore further on your own (and maybe come back in the next
office hour and ask more questions).
Time and Location
We meet on the 4th Wednesday of every month 17.00-18.00 (UTC) in
#wikimedia-research IRC channel on freenode [1].
The first meeting will be on January 22.
Up-to-date information on mediawiki [2]
Archiving
If you miss the office hour, you can read the logs of it at [3].
The future announcements about these office hours will only go to the
following lists so please make sure you're subscribed to them if you like
to receive a ping:
* wiki-research-l mailing list [4]
* analytics mailing list [5]
* wikidata mailing list [6]
* the Research category in Space [7]
on behalf of Research and Analytics,
Martin
[1] irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-research
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[3] https://wm-bot.wmflabs.org/logs/%23wikimedia-research/
[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
[5] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
[6] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
[7] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/tags/research
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi everybody,
2019 is coming to an end, and we want to keep you updated on the current
efforts of the Wikimedia Research team <https://research.wikimedia.org/> on
fighting disinformation on Wikipedia. During the last months we have been
working on understanding the "disinformation eco-system”, its effects on
Wikipedia and what research can do to fight this problem. To that end, we
have done i) a literature review on online disinformation
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.12596.pdf>; ii) a study on how patrolling
currently works on Wikipedia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Patrolling_on_Wikipedia/Report>
iii) and also discussed with the Wikipedia community
<https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation>about
their interests and priorities on this front. All this has helped us to
understand some of the main mechanisms that are being used today to spread
online disinformation and also what are the actions and technologies that
can help to mitigate this problem.
We have also identified areas that still require more research, both to
better understand the problem of disinformation introduced on Wikipedia,
and new technologies that needs to be developed to be used in the context
of Wikipedia to fight against disinformation. The most relevant areas that
we are going to work during the following months are:
-
Understand how disinformation spreads across different projects: Improve
our understanding on content spreading across different projects and how
this affects the quality of information.
-
Develop / Improve Machine Learning technique to fight
disinformation: Develop
new machine learning solutions to support the editors on content
verification and source credibility assessments.
-
Monitoring social media links to Wikipedia: We are going to create a
social media monitoring system that will help patrollers and admins to
understand some activities on social media that can affect the quality of
information on Wikipedia.
We will be happy to know more about other efforts on fighting
disinformation on Wikipedia, and also to get your feedback about our
research. If you want to learn more about this or other research
projects, please refer to our last research report
<https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html> or contact us.
I wish you a great 2020, free of disinformation ;)
Best,
--
Diego Saez-Trumper
Research Scientist - WMF
Forwarding an announcement. For what it's worth, WMF is listed as a sponsor
of the 2019 conference, and multiple conference tracks appear to be
relevant to Wikiverse activities. However, announcements which include
lofty adjectives such as "visionary" often give me pause due to the risk of
over-promising and under-delivering. Your views may vary.
Regards,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jui-Yi Tsai <vincentthunder2011(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 2:42 AM
Subject: [AI] The WebConf (WWW 2020) Call for Papers (Demo Track)
To: <ai(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*The WebConf (WWW) Call for Papers: Demo Track*
April 20-24, 2020
Taipei, Taiwan
https://www2020.thewebconf.org/
*Important Dates*
• Submission deadline: January 06, 2020
• Notification: February 10, 2020
For almost three decades, the Web Conference series has been the premier
venue for researchers, academics, businesses and standards bodies to come
together and discuss latest updates and the future of the Web. The
Demonstration Track of the Web Conference has become an important venue for
sharing cutting-edge and exciting web-based prototype systems with
significant research and development efforts. The Demonstrations Track
allows researchers and practitioners to demonstrate first-hand visionary
systems with innovative features and functionalities in a dedicated
session. Submissions must be based on an implemented and tested system that
pursues one or more innovative ideas in the interest areas of the
conference.
*Topics include (but are not limited to)*
● Health on the Web
● Behavioral analysis and personalization
● Crowdsourcing systems and social media
● Bio-feedback and emotional computation
● New human-computer interfaces
● Internet economics, monetization, and online markets
● Pervasive Web and mobility
● Security, privacy, and trust
● Semantics and knowledge
● Semantic Web, content analysis, and Web mining
● Social networks, social analysis, and computational social science
● Web infrastructure: datacenters, cloud computing, and systems
● User modeling, personalization, and experience
● Mobile, ubiquitous, ambient, and pervasive computation, Web of Things
● Web science, Web search, and Web systems
Demonstrations are encouraged from academic researchers, from industrial
practitioners with prototypes or in-production deployments, as well as from
any W3C-related activities to interact while exploring the latest
techniques for managing web information and knowledge. Software (including
games or learning platforms) and hardware demos will be considered equally,
provided they show innovative use of Web-based techniques. Each submission
must make clear which aspects of the system will be demonstrated, and how.
What exactly will the audience experience? What are the interesting
scenarios to motivate the demonstration? They should strive to state the
significance of the contribution to Web technology or applications. In
other words, submissions should describe the intended audience, point out
the innovative aspects of the system being demonstrated, and explain how
those aspects contribute to the state of the art in the Web and information
technology. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the track
program committee, who will judge the originality, significance, quality,
and clarity of each submission.
*Submission Guidelines*
Demonstration Track submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG
Proceedings Template and are limited to four pages (including references
and appendices). It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that
submissions adhere strictly to the required format. The format cannot be
modified with the objective of squeezing in more material. Submissions that
do not comply with the formatting guidelines will be rejected without
review.
Each demonstration track submission should contain an introduction, brief
description, screenshots, value and contribution. Submissions should also
indicate how the demonstration will be demonstrated and the hardware
requirements (for the organizers).
Submissions must be double-blinded. Submissions must be in PDF and must be
made through the EasyChair system (Demonstrations Track):
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=www2020
At least one author of each accepted demonstration paper must register for
the conference and attend in person to demonstrate the system during the
demonstration sessions.
To better identify the value of demonstrations, as well as to reach out to
external audiences, we also encourage authors to submit a pointer to a
screencast, using web-accessible platforms such as Vimeo or YouTube. The
maximum duration of screencasts is 10 minutes. We also highly encourage any
external material related to the demo (e.g., shared code on GitHub).
*Track Co-chairs*
Hsu-Chun Hsiao (National Taiwan University)
De-Nian Yang (Academia Sinica)
Email: demos2020(a)thewebconf.org
_______________________________________________
AI mailing list
AI(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ai
Workshop on Innovative Ideas in Data Science (IID)
IID is a half-day workshop organized in conjunction with the *The Web
Conference* in Taipei, Taiwan, on Monday, *20 April 2020.*
http://hyadatalab.com/IID2020/
Workshop goals
The goal of IID is to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners
from both academia and industry to discuss innovative, thought-provoking,
and visionary ideas in data science. The emphasis is on potentially
disruptive research directions that challenge current research agendas and
suggest future ones.
Many workshops associated with The Web Conference have become more like
mini-conferences themselves. Our vision for IID is complementary: it is a
place for early-stage work on blue-sky, high-risk, and high-reward
research, where the authors can benefit from community feedback.
We are inviting short position papers, up to 4 pages long, and are
especially (but not exclusively) looking for papers that do at least one of
the following:
-
identify fundamental open questions (including both new questions and
old-but-forgotten questions),
-
introduce a new way of thinking,
-
offer a constructive critique of current research agendas,
-
reframe or debunk existing work,
-
report unexpected early results,
-
suggest promising but unproven ideas,
-
propose novel evaluation methods.
An ideal submission is one that (1) is likely to stimulate discussion and
(2) has the potential to open up a new line of research. We do not require
full evaluations; well-reasoned arguments or preliminary evaluations could
be sufficient.
Submission information
We welcome both novel research papers, work-in-progress papers, and
visionary papers. All papers will be peer-reviewed in single-blind mode
(i.e., authors do not need to anonymize their papers).
Submissions should be in PDF, written in English, with a maximum of 4 pages
(not including references). Shorter papers are also welcome.
Please format your paper using the ACM SIG conference proceedings template
(use sample-sigconf.pdf as the template) available at
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
Submit at EasyChair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iid2020
At least one author of an accepted paper must attend the workshop to
present the work.
Important dates
If authors want paper to appear in proceedings:
-
Submission deadline: 24 January 2020
-
Author feedback: 10 February 2020
-
Camera-ready version due: 17 February 2020
If authors do not want paper to appear in proceedings:
-
Submission deadline: 21 February 2020
-
Author feedback: 6 March 2020
Further information and contact
Website: http://hyadatalab.com/IID2020/
Email: iid-workshop(a)googlegroups.com
Organizing team
Dafna Shahaf, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Robert West, EPFL
Ashton Anderson, University of Toronto
Jie Tang, Tsinghua University
Hi everyone,
We’re preparing for the December 2019 research newsletter and looking for contributors. Please take a look at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201912 and add your name next to any paper you are interested in covering. Our writing deadline is 27 December 23:59 UTC. If you can't make this deadline but would like to cover a particular paper in the subsequent issue, leave a note next to the paper's entry below. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews are most welcome.
Highlights from this month:
- Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text
- Collaboration Drives Individual Productivity
- Collectively biased representations of the past: Ingroup Bias in Wikipedia articles about intergroup conflicts
- Content and Conduct: How English Wikipedia Moderates Harmful Speech
- Dynamical systems' models for the prediction of multi-variable time series. Wikipedia's traffic example
- Following the footsteps of giants: Modeling the mobility of historically notable individuals using Wikipedia
- GeBioToolkit: Automatic Extraction of Gender-Balanced Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies
- Investigating Saturation in Collaboration and Cohesiveness of Wikipedia Using Motifs Analysis
- Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering
- On the Relation of Edit Behavior, Link Structure, and Article Quality on Wikipedia
- Readability of English Wikipedia's health information over time
- Structuring the world’s knowledge: Socio-technical processes and data quality in Wikidata
- Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics?
Masssly and Tilman Bayer
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) | Twitter
Hello everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, December 18,
at 9:30 AM PST/17:30 UTC. We’ll have a presentation from Fabian Suchanek on
incomplete knowledge bases and one from Brian Keegan about Wikipedia and
the 2016 US Presidential election.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4VrphM_TTA
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
This month's presentations:
Making Knowledge Bases More Complete
By Fabian Suchanek, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
A Knowledge Base (KB) is a computer-readable collection of facts about the
world (examples are Wikidata, DBpedia, and YAGO). The problem is that these
KBs are often missing entities or facts. In this talk, I present some new
methods to combat this incompleteness. I will also quickly talk about some
other research projects we are currently pursuing, including a new version
of YAGO. Publications <https://suchanek.name/work/publications/>
The Dynamics of Peer-Produced Political Information During the 2016 U.S.
Presidential Campaign
By Brian Keegan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Information
Science, University of Colorado Boulder
Wikipedia plays a crucial role for online information seeking and its
editors have a remarkable capacity to rapidly revise its content in
response to current events. How did the production and consumption of
political information on Wikipedia mirror the dynamics of the 2016 U.S.
Presidential campaign? Drawing on systems justification theory and methods
for measuring the enthusiasm gap among voters, this paper quantitatively
analyzes the candidates' biographical and related articles and their
editors. Information production and consumption patterns match major events
over the course of the campaign, but Trump-related articles show
consistently higher levels of engagement than Clinton-related articles.
Analysis of the editors' participation and backgrounds show analogous
shifts in the composition and durability of the collaborations around each
candidate. The implications for using Wikipedia to monitor political
engagement are discussed. Paper
<http://www.brianckeegan.com/papers/CSCW_2019_Elections.pdf>
--
Janna Layton (she, her)
Administrative Assistant - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>