[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [PRESS] Quality of Wikipedia entries depends on authors' collaboration

[Cary Bass]

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Forwarding interesting article:

http://sify.com/news/quality-of-wikipedia-entries-depends-on-authors-collaboration-news-international-kdmpudgegha.html


Quality of Wikipedia entries depends on authors' collaboration

2010-03-12 15:20:00
Last Updated: 2010-03-12 15:38:12
A new research by an Arizona University Professor of Indian origin has
found that the quality of entries in Wikipedia depends on how authors
collaborate.

Sudha Ram, a UA's Eller College of Management professor, co-authored
the article with Jun Liu, a graduate student in the management
information systems department (MIS). Their report bagged the "Best
Paper Award" at the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems
held in conjunction with the International Conference on Information
Systems, or ICIS.

Ram, a McClelland Professor of MIS in the Eller College, said: Most of
the existing research on Wikipedia is at the aggregate level, looking
at total number of edits for an article, for example, or how many
unique contributors participated in its creation.

"What was missing was an explanation for why some articles are of high
quality and others are not.

"We investigated the relationship between collaboration and data quality."

Wikipedia, the world's largest open-access online encyclopaedia, has
an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles
at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. Ram and Liu
randomly compiled 400 articles at each quality level and used a data
provenance model they developed in an earlier paper.

Ram explained: "We used data mining techniques and identified various
patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more
specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles.

"These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are
detrimental to data quality."

Ram and Liu identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia
contributors play.

Starters, for instance, create sentences but seldom engage in other
actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with
resources and links. Copy editors contribute primarily though
modifying existing sentences. Some users - the all-round contributors
- - perform many different functions.

Ram said: "We then clustered the articles based on these roles and
examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what
kind of quality resulted.

"We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality
entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual
contributors dominated."

She pointed out that to generate the best-quality entries people in
many different roles must collaborate.

Ram said: "A software tool could prompt contributors to justify their
insertions by adding links...and down the line, other software tools
could encourage specific role setting and collaboration patterns to
improve overall quality."

The impetus behind the report came from Ram's involvement in UA's 50
million dollar iPlant Collaborative, which is funded by the National
Science Foundation and aims to unite the international scientific
community around solving plant biology's "grand challenge" questions.
Ram's role is a faculty advisor and has to develop a
cyberinfrastructure to facilitate collaboration.

She said: "We initially suggested wikis for this, but we faced a lot
of resistance." Scientists raised concerns ranging from lack of
experience using the wikis to lack of incentive.

"We wondered how we could make people collaborate.

"So we looked at the English version of Wikipedia. There are more than
three million entries, and thousands of people contribute voluntarily
on a daily basis."

She added: "If we want scientists to be collaborative...we need to
assign them to specific roles and motivate them to police themselves
and justify their contributions." (ANI)
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