“Wikipedia discussions can thus be seen as a mirror of a stream of public consciousness, where those elements which are still not part of a shared consolidated heritage are object of a continuous negotiation among different points of view.”
There is No Deadline – Time Evolution of Wikipedia Discussions. (2012) Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado. arXiv:1204.3453v1
via summarizing it for Wikipedia Signpost, longer summary space on AcaWiki
Tags: points of view, Talk pages, Wikipedia
Posted in argumentative discussions, information ecosystem, PhD diary, social web | Comments (0)
Long discussions cause challenges for Wikipedians. That’s great motivation from some of my work.
Such discussions can often present a challenge to the editor who steps up to close them; “no consensus” is a common outcome for convoluted debates, a lack of resolution that opens the possibility of discussion starting all over again as the same issues continue to arise.
– Wikipedia Signpost, 2012-03-19
The report also links to Wikipedia’s essay on Too long; didn’t read; image from KnowYourMeme’s coverage of tl;dr.
Tags: coordination on Wikipedia, quotes, tl;dr, Wikipedia
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“The only constant is change.” – Heraclitis
How well do you know Wikipedia? Get to know it a little better by looking at how your favorite article changes over time. To inspire you, here are two examples.
Jon Udell’s screencast about ‘Heavy Metal Umlaut’ is a classic, looking back (in 2005) at the first two years of that article. It points out the accumulation of information, vandalism (and its swift reversion), formatting changes, and issues around the verifiability of facts.
In a recent article for the Awl ((The Awl is *woefully* distracting. I urge you not to follow any links. (Thanks a lot Louis!) )), Emily Morris sifts through 2,303 edits of ‘Lolita’ to pull out nitpicking revision comments, interesting diffs, and statistics.
Tags: change, Wikipedia
Posted in books and reading, future of publishing, information ecosystem, library and information science, social web | Comments (0)
Today Alex is presenting our short paper (PDF) at SemWiki. We describe an extension to SIOC for MediaWiki Talk pages: the SIOC WikiTalk ontology, http://rdfs.org/sioc/wikitalk.
The general line of research is to provide tools for arguing, convincing others, and understanding the status of a debate, in social media, with Semantic Web technologies. This is work in progress and suggestions and other feedback are most welcome.
Besides the short paper (PDF), these slides are also downloadable (slides PDF).
Tags: coordination, MediaWiki, Talk pages, Wikipedia
Posted in PhD diary, semantic web, social semantic web | Comments (0)