Wikisym 2012 Report
Introduction
- Wikimedia UK-funded travel report to Wikisym 2012 and Ars Electronica
- by Gavin Baily, TraceMedia
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, 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.
Wikipedia representation by language and culture
Jimmy Wales
One of the highlights of the symposium was Jimmy Wales keynote speech which focused on the opportunities and challenges for Wikipedia over the next 5 to 10 years. As a key aspiration Wales asked us to 'Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the Sum of all Human knowledge'. In terms of growth, Wales identified the developing world and in particular Africa as a site for increasing participation. Although increasing internet access is the main driver in this, Wales said that he had caused some controversy when he tweeted that “Broadband speed in Nigeria. Beats New York City”
As part of the effort to encourage participation in under-represented languages Wales described the sudden growth of the Yorùbá edition in 2011, and his presentation of the second annual 'Jimbo Award' to User:Demmy for this single-handed contribution. User:Demmy had created a bot that added 15,000 articles in one month, doubling the editions size, and increasing the number of active editors. Drawing a parallel with other editions of Wikipedia, Wales said that the use of bots to generate a large number of articles (particularly for geographic locations) had been significant in bolstering Polish, and indeed English.
[Mark contributors by language]
Considering some of the challenges facing Wikipedia, Wales discussed gender imbalance, the slight decline in the number of English editors, and strategies for improving the user-friendliness of Wiki user interfaces. In relation to gender imbalance Wales described the case of Kate Middleton's dress. When the article was first written it was flagged for deletion as lacking notability, despite the widespread media interest. This in contrast to the volume of articles about Linux releases, which arguably have a smaller audience. Jodi Schneider pointed out that the dress controversy has spawned a whole category Royal wedding dresses.
On the subject of English Wikipedia's decline, Wales speculated that one possible factor is that so many historic subjects already have comprehensive articles. He cited the case of George Wallace, 45th Governor of Alabama, a less famous politician, who already has a very comprehensive article. Looking to the future of Wikipedia's editing tools, although innovations such as the visual editor are in development, Wales was concerned that too greater conservatism within the community would impede efforts to experiment with more user-friendly interfaces, and so encourage new contributors.