Wikipedia

From Travis Kriplean's Homepage

Wikipedia research

Wikipedians share no less goal than producing a comprehensive account of all human knowledge. As the community and corpus have grown in size (participants and text) and popularity, complex relationships of cooperation, coercion and control have emerged amongst participants as they work to add, remove, and organize content.

At the heart of Wikipedia's production is its model of consensus for making decisions. I'm interested in building technologies to support consensus-based approaches to collaboratively authored documents. At least in Wikipedia, the current Wiki technology appears to be quite primitive for supporting long discussions on popular and controversial articles.

I edit Wikipedia as Leafman

We've mainly focused on examining Wikipedia's body of policies and how Wikipedians employ them in discussions^[1][2]. Its incredible how Wikipedians have evolved a body of policies that reflect a normative structure based on deliberative principles, and how these policies are brought to bear during discussions. Wikipedia may be the best example of an online space where people can get a proper civics lesson -- that is, learn how to constructively disagree with others. Not only are Wikipedians writing an encyclopedia, but they are collectively learning how to collaboratively write an encyclopedia.

We are currently studying the types of work that Wikipedians value so as to support the design of tools that makes valued work visible (e.g. reputation and recommender systems)^[3]. Our newest data source has been the barnstars that editors give one another in appreciation for work well done.

History

I started studying Wikipedia in the summer of 2006 while an intern at the Information Dynamics Lab of HP Labs, where I worked most closely with Scott Golder. After the internship, I got Ivan Beschastnikh and David McDonald interested in the work I was doing; we've been working together since.

References

See the publications page for paper and slide links.

1. ↑ Travis Kriplean; Ivan Beschastnikh; David W. McDonald; Scott A. Golder (2007). "Community, Consensus, Coercion, Control: CS*W or How Policy Mediates Mass Participation". GROUP '07: Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM conference on Supporting group work: 167-176, ACM Press New York, NY, USA.
2. ↑ Ivan Beschastnikh; Travis Kriplean; David W. McDonald (2008). "Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens". ICWSM '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
3. ↑ Travis Kriplean; Ivan Beschastnikh; David W. McDonald (2008). "Articulations of WikiWork: Uncovering Valued Work in Wikipedia through Barnstars". CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work: 37-46.