Wikisym 2012 Report

Introduction

Wikisym 2012 was hosted by the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, and coincided with the Ars Electronica Festival 'The Big Picture'. WikiSym is one the most important annual venues for sharing research, ideas and experience around Wiki collaborations, and was attended by academics, researchers and Wikimedia representatives from around the globe.

With the travel award generously provided by the Wikimedia UK, the author, Gavin Baily, was able to attend the symposium and present research projects at both WikiSym and Ars Electronica. The work presented at symposium covered a broad range of themes, and was informed by the ever accumulating archives of Wikipedia and other Wiki projects. The scale and complexity these datasets provides researchers with a rich source of meta data that is generated in the course of Wiki production. Examples of this meta data include talk pages and comments, language inter-links, citations, revision logs, user account histories and usage, and also semantic analysis of page content. These features of the data were used to ask broader questions about the sociology, content, and cultural diversity of Wiki projects, and ultimately how Wiki communities function, and how they might be developed in the future.

In the following sections I'll outline some of themes that emerged from the symposium, focusing on research around Wikipedia and the diverse methods of analysing content. In particular I'll look at work that explores how Wikipedia is represented in different language editions, a topic that was central to the symposium keynotes, and the subject of a number of research papers. The work outlined here represents a small fraction of the contributions, for a comprehensive program see WikiSym 2012.