Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri taha.yaseri@gmail.comwrote:

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.eduwrote:

...

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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- 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:

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 wrote: Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri 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 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Taha.

-- Taha.

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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.

From a research perspective, doing a survey or interview of some of the editors on their perspective of what was going on might be informative to provide better interpretation of the data. Given the protection/semi-protection of the page means it is probably possible to contact many of them via their user talk page. It would be very interesting to know if those who appear to be involved in an edit war saw it as an edit war, and to what extent they thought they were acting collaboratively and by what means was that collaboration fostered (e.g. explicit discussions on talk page, or more implicit, e.g. adopting a consistent style established by other editors).

Kerry

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@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.orgmailto: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.commailto: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.commailto: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.edumailto: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.orgmailto: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.orgmailto: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.orgmailto: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.orgmailto: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_Aurora... 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_Aurora... will doubtless include some of the experienced editors who pitched in when it got active.

WSC

On 23 July 2012 03:40, Brian Keegan bkeegan@northwestern.edu wrote:

Thanks for the note and provocative questions. I think assuming the lack of explicit communication disqualifies the activity as collaboration is a very narrow view of collaboration. Indeed, in the context of a breaking news event the talk pages is a poor approximation of the actual communication taking place. For example, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami article at 8:00 UTChttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami&oldid=418265591on March 11 covers substantially more information than is reflected on the talk page at the same timehttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami&oldid=418265617 while the revision comments for this period are especially rich. My previous research suggests that power editors who dominate contributions to these article resort to more synchronous channels such as IRC to coordinate their work (paper http://www.brianckeegan.com/papers/WikiSym11.pdf) which bears out your argument that editors resort to other backchannels to coordinate this work.

Moreover, a substantial amount of collaboration takes place through implicit work of reading revision comments and monitoring revision histories which leads to the development of develop shared mental models of the work to be done and transactive memory systems of who is doing what. Furthermore, theories of stigmergy suggests that the artifact (like the article) itself can encode consensus and coordinate subsequent action in distributed information work absent any explicit communication (linkhttp://crowston.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/stigmergy.pdf, link http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389041701000535, link http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0612/0612071.pdf). The work that has already been done and still needs to be done is encoded within the object itself (e.g., broken template needing closing braces) without the need for any communication. I think this is absolutely collaboration.

Walking down the street or asynchronously editing a document with several dozen other editors are examples of collaboration which demand collective mind and heedful interrelation. Borrowing from Weick and Robertshttp://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2393372 (1993): "actors construct their actions (don't run into other people while en route) understanding the system consists of connected actions by themselves and others (other people are trying to do the same thing) and interrelate their actions within the system (try to walk the same speed as the people around you)." This "stampede" may not require much in the way of higher cognition as with jointly writing a research paper, but it's absolutely the joint accomplishment of work towards a shared goal which is collaboration in my book.

What the analysis attempts to capture at a very coarse level is not the happenstance interactions (the peripheral nodes and one-off links) but rather the emerging framework of "silent collaboration" as some editors have a consistent tendency to have many interactions, repeatedly interact, or are connected to particular kinds of other editors. Regarding the coarseness of the analysis, you would be right to point out that the fact that someone makes a change once after another user is almost certainly a spurious interaction: they could have been editing completely different parts of the article. Work by Aaron Halfaker (paperhttp://www.grouplens.org/system/files/halfaker11bite.personal.pdf) and Jeff Rzeszotarski (paperhttp://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145204.2145272) has each looked at content-level changes which is substantially more persuasive in this regard. However, the work editors do in the long-run is necessarily contingent on the work others have done before them and is what I believe emerges into the clusters of sustained interaction which my method captures (not just edit wars). To the (very limited) extent these interactions are the function of edit warring (the "Possibly related events" in early history of the 2011 Norway attackshttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2011_Norway_attacks&dir=prev&limit=500&action=historyis an excellent example of it), other editors intervene and also make changes. These subsequent and sustained dyadic interactions are potentially illustrative of important dynamics such as polarization, centralization, specialization, etc. which emerge from successive interactions.

As you suggest, my post and much of my other research is absolutely missing a crucial qualitative component of what motivates these editors, how they make sense of others' contributions, and how they accomplish this work. Some forthcoming research of mine suggests that these articles are not one-off collaborations but there are editors who are effectively dedicated to coordinating and collaborating on breaking news articles. Further work in the domain should explore the extent to which this implicit work involves repeated repertoires of action (e.g., focused on reformatting references), emulating stylistic precedent/consensus (e.g., fill in the blanks from using previous hurricane articles), or employing specialized practices (e.g., adopting templates for death tolls). I think survey research of any defensible validity is immensely difficult to design and execute, so I avoid it at all costs, but that's my methodological bias :)

I'm very happy to have people poke holes in my ideas now so that I can have snappier responses in front of conference audiences and dissertation committees!

Best,

Brian

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Kerry Raymond k.raymond@qut.edu.auwrote:

...

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. ****

---

From a research perspective, doing a survey or interview of some of the editors on their perspective of what was going on might be informative to provide better interpretation of the data. Given the protection/semi-protection of the page means it is probably possible to contact many of them via their user talk page. It would be very interesting to know if those who appear to be involved in an edit war saw it as an edit war, and to what extent they thought they were acting collaboratively and by what means was that collaboration fostered (e.g. explicit discussions on talk page, or more implicit, e.g. adopting a consistent style established by other editors).****

---

Kerry****

---

*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces@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> 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 wrote:****

Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!****

---

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri 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 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

-- Taha.****

---

-- Taha.

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

---

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

-- Taha.****

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 8:44 AM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

Commenting as an experienced editor who has routinely worked on "breaking news" articles in English Wikipedia,my main experience is that with other experienced editors, the article and its history implicitly provide most of the collaboration needed. Edit summaries and edits speak to the other editor's intentions, views and approaches, and I work with those as implicit collaboration, taking them into account and adjusting mine accordingly (or disagreeing if needed) as if the editors had explicitly stated them.

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

My most usual routine editing a "breaking news" high profile article is to watch the diffs and see if anything's been done I disagree with. If it looks good then I don't have to do more than add mine, and with many other editors involved that's often all it takes. [[Higgs boson]] around 4 July (breaking news of major scientific discovery) is a good example of how this works.

I resort to the talk page when there is a stance or action by another editor that I feel needs explicit consideration, or to be explicit about my own editing when the above probably isn't sufficient, and explicit dialog is needed. It's useful to fill others in or check where we see a tricky of disagreed point, but it's wasteful of time if not needed, (or inefficient in academic terms) so it's less preferred compared to the above.

Often if I have a concern about an editor's actual way of editing, or factual accuracy or action, I'll post a note to their talk page explaining I have a concern and could they look at it, or I've removed a comment and this is why. The reason for that is, if it doesn't need wide consideration, or may reflect poorly on them, or I'm asking it as a friendly favor/request, putting it on the talk page is like someone's mom putting the request to tidy the kitchen on twitter or a blog - it's unnecessarily wide broadcast. If what I'm writing is just for the user themselves, even if article related, I might put it on their talk page first as a low key approach to keep them apprised. If there is a problem and it persists, then it might be handled at the talk page too.

So you see, there are many nuances to collaboration, and for experienced editors, the talk page becomes the place where we deal with less experienced editors, or matters needing explicit dialog - but many collborative matters don't need those.

FT2

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 1:52 AM, Kerry Raymond k.raymond@qut.edu.auwrote:

...

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. ****

---

From a research perspective, doing a survey or interview of some of the editors on their perspective of what was going on might be informative to provide better interpretation of the data. Given the protection/semi-protection of the page means it is probably possible to contact many of them via their user talk page. It would be very interesting to know if those who appear to be involved in an edit war saw it as an edit war, and to what extent they thought they were acting collaboratively and by what means was that collaboration fostered (e.g. explicit discussions on talk page, or more implicit, e.g. adopting a consistent style established by other editors).****

---

Kerry****

---

*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces@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> 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 wrote:****

Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!****

---

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri 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 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

-- Taha.****

---

-- Taha.

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

---

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l****

-- Taha.****

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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:

Walking down the street suggests different objectives and a sole criterion of "other people not impacting my agenda".

What about when the common activity is a genuinely common agenda on the same object or structure, such as painting a room, and participants' actions include seeing who's doing what, adjusting your contribution or current activity to try and make it easy for them, when you see them doing things and pass them tools or deal with the matters it's clear they see as problems, in order that their area of focus is progressed and faciliated, and when you can see the pattern they are painting in one area and you stop yours to help theirs, identify what they're aiming for by their painting to date, and you pick up another pot of paint to give them a hand in the places it's clear their intention is to complete, and when you deliberately take time to build on or enhance their initial outline by painting extra decorations within it, and watching to see if they like it or not?

Then, I think, it can't be compared to the narrow activity of "ensure others don't intrude on my intentions and otherwise complete indifference" as occurs when people walk down the street.

FT2

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.com 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. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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 k.raymond@qut.edu.au

My original point about walking together alone vs in a crowd was to illustrate that the same data (the relative movements of the two people) can have two different interpretations depending on context. I was trying to illustrate the danger of quantitative analysis without validation from qualitative sources.****

---

I was not presenting it as an example of collaboration or anything else. However, since the topic has arisen, ...****

---

I think there needs to be a shared goal for collaboration. Thus most WP editors are “collaborating” because they have the shared goal of building a bigger and better encyclopaedia (there are editors with other motivations – such as vandals, self-promoters, etc) . I would agree that a crowd of people working down the street together is not a collaboration, and that cooperation or coordination is a better term for it. However, the distinction is not clear cut. Generally in life, our goals get broken into sub-goals. So, your goal is to provide well for your family, so you decide you need a better paying job (sub-goal), so you enrol in a Masters degree to upgrade your qualifications to get the better job (sub-sub-goal), etc. So back to walking down the street in a crowd. We presume that the goal of the people are mostly different, some are heading to the shops, others to the train station, others to the office, etc. But this goal has a sub-goal of getting safely to the end of the street, which requires us not to trip over one another. Are we collaborating with respect to the goal of getting safely to the end of the street, but cooperating/coordinating with respect of the different goals of going to the shops or the office? There are infinite shades of grey in this regard; it depends on where you choose to put the goal-posts (pun intended).****

---

This is where stigmergy (the notion of collaboration without explicit communication but with the ability to sense the environment) which makes a lot of sense when discussing insects doesn’t translate well to people. This is because insects can’t talk and we presume that the pheromone trails etc they leave on the environment are involuntary side-effects of their actions (e.g finding food), which are then observed from the environment by other insects. A human analogy would be leaving our footprints when we walk along the sand or leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. Wikipedia is often described as stigmergic collaboration because many editors are at work without a lot of explicit communication (talk pages, email, IRC) to coordinate their activities. So what is the environment through which WP stigmergy informs editors in the absence of explicit communication? The general presumption is that it is the articles themselves, but I think most of us would struggle with the notion that article edits are involuntary side-effects; they seem quite deliberate actions by editors (apart perhaps for the typos!) with the intention of communicating some information to the WP readership. Or to put it the other way, everything about WP is deliberate communication, so the insect analogy breaks down. So, any model of stigmergic collaboration in humans has to draw a line between what will be regarded an explicit communication and what is sensing the environment (observing the footprints in the sand). It’s just that the line is hard to draw as humans are highly communicative creatures and everything about the WWW is communicative. Nonetheless we might argue that recommender systems “people who bought this also bought that” on Amazon creates new knowledge from observing an environment of purchases and are hence stigmergic. Similar arguments apply to “price guides” based on ebay sales data etc. In which case we would say that a WP article is stigmergic as it creates new body of knowledge from the largely independent contributions of many editors and I think many editors do not read talk pages or edit histories but simply look at the article and see something missing or wrong and decide to fix that.****

---

So I guess I am moving to the conclusion that while some of the most active & dedicated WP editors are engaged in explicit communication in order to coordinate various activities (not stigmergic), the long tail of editors is behaving stigmergically. ****

---

Kerry****

---

*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *FT2 *Sent:* Tuesday, 24 July 2012 4:12 AM *To:* jschneider@pobox.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities

*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting****

---

Walking down the street suggests different objectives and a sole criterion of "other people not impacting my agenda". ****

---

What about when the common activity is a genuinely common agenda on the same object or structure, such as painting a room, and participants' actions include seeing who's doing what, adjusting your contribution or current activity to try and make it easy for them, when you see them doing things and pass them tools or deal with the matters it's clear they see as problems, in order that their area of focus is progressed and faciliated, and when you can see the pattern they are painting in one area and you stop yours to help theirs, identify what they're aiming for by their painting to date, and you pick up another pot of paint to give them a hand in the places it's clear their intention is to complete, and when you deliberately take time to build on or enhance their initial outline by painting extra decorations within it, and watching to see if they like it or not? ****

---

Then, I think, it can't be compared to the narrow activity of "ensure others don't intrude on my intentions and otherwise complete indifference" as occurs when people walk down the street.****

---

---

FT2****

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.com 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.****

---

Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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@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