Ok! the page is protected. Sorry! On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: -- Taha.

Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on this article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most importantly the fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're mostly focused on scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study how enabling reader feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking news articles, especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous contributors don't have a voice. Dario On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

I think this study of the "collaborative" dynamics is interesting, but I have some questions. Do we have any evidence that collaboration is actually occurring? With breaking news like this, it may just be many individuals operating independently? Collaboration pretty much requires a communication channel, but internal to WP the only visible communication is the talk page (and perhaps user talk pages). We might infer that editors participating in a consensus-building thread in the talk page (or user talk pages) are acting collaboratively in relation to the issue under discussion (but not necessarily more widely. However, if editors are disagreeing in a talk page thread, it is hard to say whether their edits in relation to that issue are collaborative or "warring" (deliberating seeking to undo another) or simply independent (using their best judgement at that moment). Nor can we readily judge if editors not writing on the talk page might still be reading it and thus informing their actions based on those discussions - that is, might be acting in "silent collaboration". Nor can we tell if any of the editors are having private conversations via email or other means . As communication takes time, in a breaking news situation editors might prefer to just "be bold" and keep the page as up-to-date as possible, using their own "best judgement" rather than "waste" time arguing on the talk page. Can we consider reversions and mutual reversions in a "breaking news" situation as revealing an "edit war"? With many editors simultaneously active, I think you have to consider that it is just a stampede that is taking place. It's a bit like "walking together". If just two people walk down a street, we can say pretty clearly if they are walking together (they will remain in close alignment most of the time). But if a crowd of people are walking down the street, it's hard to say that two people are walking together - they might just be forced into that alignment by the crowd. I think we have the same situation with reversions with simultaneous editors operating in a breaking news situation; many individuals acting independently and reversions might not be intentional. Kerry From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Taha Yasseri Sent: Monday, 23 July 2012 3:20 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting I resend my previous message that is not delivered yet. Sorry for potential duplicate receiving . Now, after two days, there are 30 Wikipedia language editions who have covered the event (have an article on it). Here: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/blog.html, see the dynamics, i.e. number of covering WPs versus time, measured in minutes and counted from the event time (t=0). For those who are familiar with spreading phenomena, the curve comes as no surprise. What is surprising, is the fast reaction of Latvian (3rd place) and rather late reaction of Japanese Wikipedia (the latter is most likely related to time zone effects). As I did this in a very unprofessional way, errors and miscalculations are expected, please notify if find. bests, .taha On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org<mailto:dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on this article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most importantly the fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're mostly focused on scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study how enabling reader feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking news articles, especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous contributors don't have a voice. Dario On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote: It is currently semiprotected, there were IP edits when it was first created. But according to the logs it was fully protected for a while due to IP vandalism. However the edit history only shows it going to semi protection, but there were some moves which have complicated things WSC On 21 July 2012 22:46, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri@gmail.com<mailto:taha.yaseri@gmail.com>> wrote: Ok! the page is protected. Sorry! On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri@gmail.com<mailto:taha.yaseri@gmail.com>> wrote: Thank you Brian, Could you also plot the absolute number of edits, and editors, (instead of the ratio)? Though, since the data is ready I could do it on my own too! Surprisingly I see no IP contribution to the article (or may be only few), not in accord with my expectation for such a topic. cheers, .Taha On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Brian Keegan <bkeegan@northwestern.edu<mailto:bkeegan@northwestern.edu>> wrote: My preliminary analysis of (English) Wikipedia's response to the 2012 Aurora shootings. Data is available at the bottom: http://www.brianckeegan.com/2012/07/2012-aurora-shootings/ -- Brian C. Keegan Ph.D. Student - Media, Technology, & Society School of Communication, Northwestern University Science of Networks in Communities, Laboratory for Collaborative Technology _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Taha. -- Taha. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Taha.

I'm not an IRC user, so I don't know whether that has been used as a collaboration back-channel, or merely a place for someone to say "extra eyes needed here please". But otherwise I can echo FT2s comments and add that "what links here" is your friend when researching such phenomena. In this instance https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/2012_Auror… a little swamped by main page involvement. Also you might want to clarify your definition of edit warring - Wikipedians will probably think in terns of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring#3RR_exemptions ie someone reverting the same vandalism half a dozen times isn't edit warring, they are just splatting vandalism. What I expect you'll find is that a number of regular experienced editors who were online at the time will have drifted over, and some of them will simply have been focussing on keeping out the unsourced rumours and vandalism. Another interesting metric in such breaking stories is the number of people watchlisting the page - currently 173 http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/watcher/?db=enwiki_p&titles=2012_Auror… will doubtless include some of the experienced editors who pitched in when it got active. WSC On 23 July 2012 03:40, Brian Keegan &lt;bkeegan(a)northwestern.edu&gt; wrote:

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 8:44 AM, FT2 &lt;ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This suggests distinguishing "coordination" and "collaboration". I don't know of firm definitions of these. Walking down the street avoiding bumping into others -- that is definitely "coordination". Whether it's "collaboration" is (to me) less clear. -Jodi

I will add "coordinating" to these other two distinctions I often make. * coordinating -- avoiding interference with independent goals * cooperating -- aligning goals, perhaps through promises or contracts * collaborating -- advancing other's goals, selflessly or based on trust I've noticed that wiki editors can sense the motives of other authors and are often right. I suspect these distinctions are harder to extract from logs by mechanical means. The counts and graphs are still interesting. Best regards. -- Ward On Jul 23, 2012, at 11:11 AM, FT2 wrote:

Very interesting discussion this, digging into precisely the things I was trying to get at in the time I could title myself a Wikipedia researcher. If I can focus enough, and feel I actually have something to add, I might try to contribute intelligently myself. For now: reading with GREAT interest. Best, Martin 2012/7/24 Kerry Raymond &lt;k.raymond(a)qut.edu.au&gt; -- http://martinho.livejournal.com May contain language!

Hi, James! Thanks for the link to your paper. It was interesting reading. I think your observations about FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) are very relevant also to Wikipedia. WP has many of the same characteristics, as both are based on "information objects", an WP edit is pretty much the same as a FLOSS patch, WP has revision control just as FLOSS has CVS, and, with the introduction of the new feedback mechanism, WP will have something moving in the general direction of the issue/bug tracker of FLOSS. The significant difference between WP and FLOSS is the scale. As you observed, FLOSS projects have quite small numbers of contributors, clearly WP has a lot lot more. However, with respect to an average WP article, the number of the contributors is perhaps closer to that of a FLOSS project, still bigger though. The observations of how work is done in FLOSS are fairly true of WP as well. I think most WP editors like to work on topics that interest them in some way (that's the utility) and do so in bite-sized chunks that fit the time they are willing to invest. WP editors do seem slightly more willing to rewrite whole articles (or large sections of them) than doing "version 2" in a FLOSS project but, then, articles are typically smaller than FLOSS code bases so it is not as big a task as a complete refactoring of a code base. What WP appears to have is more people willing to do the "housekeeping", those committed editors who roam around adding geo-locations and infoboxes and categories and standardising the capitalisation of article titles and the recent change patrol and the admins, etc. It is less clear to me what the "utility" they are getting from their efforts (some might be control freaks but I suspect the majority are just genuinely motivated by altruism -- a utility in itself). I guess these are the "polishers" in FLOSS and probably, in percentage terms, they exist in similar proportions and hence are more visible in WP because of its greater scale. And I think the low level of "co-work" in FLOOS is equivalent to the long tail of WP editors that I suspect just edit and never look at a talk page or the edit history. Now to return to your question "What's at stake here?". I think the answer to that is pretty simple. The WWW provides the basis for collaboration/cooperation/coordination (whatever you like to call it and define it) on a scale previously unimaginable. Just look at Google, Facebook, eBay etc to see how the scale of doing anything can change with the WWW. However, socially, we only have the management tools to work at a much smaller scale, especially with volunteers. Indeed, I recently did some work with a sector (that I won't name) but which has a lot of people willing to volunteer -- however, they make very little use of the volunteers in practice because (amongst other reasons) they find there is too high a staff cost in managing the volunteers. The reason Wikipedia fascinates me (as a subject of study -- it fascinates me just to read it too) is that it has found a way to harness the largely uncoordinated efforts of many volunteers into a phenomenally effective resource. Sure, we know there is a small core of employees, but it's small dollars compared to the equivalent dollar-value of the leisure time of the volunteers (yep, economists know how to put a value on everything!). And of course, it's not just volunteers, many organisations would like to know how to reduce all those layers of middle management -- the ideal corporate world would surely be an army of workers at the coalface managed by just the CEO. So if you can figure out the social and technical models for efficient and effective mass collaboration and then translate that into the software system to underpin it, then I think you've got a winner on your hands that could impact into so many spheres of our lives. Now, a lot of people have taken a simplistic view that Wikipedia has proved that wikis are good for harnessing the power of a world of volunteers and started rolling out wikis for other purposes (indeed, often using a customised version of Wikipedia's own code base since it too is freely available). Some of these have achieved their purpose, others haven't. I don't think the "secret ingredient" is just "wiki" technology. Indeed, James' paper talks about what happens when an organisation tries to do "open source" internally, which often fails because the social context is different. I think the answer is to find the patterns of social/technical that succeed and, for this purpose, studying WP and other successful large-scale WWW sites is highly informative. For example, why does Amazon beat other online book retailers hands down? The prevailing wisdom is that the users have invested in Amazon through contributing reviews, ratings, lists, etc, whereas most online book sellers are just "flogging" products with reviews supplied by the publishers. Why does Facebook succeed? Why does eBay succeed? Or TripAdvisor? Clearly these sites are different to WP, e.g. some are "for profit", and not all have such a noble purpose (I like to think I do the world a bigger favour by writing for WP than selling my sofa). Indeed, many would question that there was any purpose or benefit to Facebook :-) Equally WP has revealed problems/issues with mass collaboration over the years, e.g. edit wars, vandalism, "nazi" administrators, libellous content, controversial topics, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, when to use British vs American spelling, low participation by females and the Global South (I hate that term), quality-vs-quantity, breaking news, etc. But none of these have killed WP; it's found a way to cope well enough with many of them. Clearly these issues aren't unique to WP (e.g. we have strategies for managing many of them in traditional non-WWW contexts), but simply WP has had to deal with them on a more massive and global scale (there's no court-and-prison solution for WP vandalism). There's a lot to learn from WP so long as you look for the bigger patterns and don't fixate on specific solutions. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Howison Sent: Wednesday, 25 July 2012 4:14 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting I think this is a fascinating discussion :) What's at stake here? What do we gain or loose by calling something collaboration or not doing so? I think part of what's at stake is the ease with which one can generalize. When we say that work in Wikipedia (or Open Source) is collaboration we imply that other work that we understand as collaboration can likely learn from Wikipedia. It's somehow similar enough. If we say (for some reason) that a way of working is not collaboration (or cooperation) then we somehow loose an easy, natural way to make these justifications for research. We have to work a bit harder to make the argument but it helps us be more specific about what might transfer (and what might not). For example, if we accept the idea that some core-ish group are "collaborating" then if we want to learn from Wikipedia for, say traditional virtual teams in organizations, then we might argue that there is adequate similarity in terms of (say) reciprocal interdependence, helping-behaviors or leadership. Conversely if we accept the idea that the long-tail are working (pseudo)-stigmatically we face a choice: do we just ignore them when we try to learn something transferable, or (more likely) seek to learn something else. Say about how a combination of technology and task-design facilitates such long-tail, stigmergic contributions? Thus learning less about managing teams/teamwork and more about (re)-designing tasks/taskwork. The second approach is what Kevin Crowston and I take in an article about open source that is, we hope (!) coming out soon where we call this separate but collective work "collaboration through open superposition" (working paper here http://james.howison.name/pubs/CollaborationThroughSuperposition-WorkingPape r.pdf ) I'd be fascinated to hear how much (if any) of the thinking in there people think applies to Wikipedia. Cheers, James