Category: 4.4 Wikis and Wikipedia

  • Some Progress on Wikipedia Editing

    Wikipedia has long been suffering from its rather raw “wiki markup” editing experience. The reason is that the underlying software is stuck in the mud and any progress is slow and painful. Right now there is some excitement over progress on the “visual editor” of Mediawiki. As you can see in the video below the…

  • World Views Are Not Data Inconsistencies

    I’m at Wikimania 2013, listening in on the WikiData session. WikiData is the Wikimedia Foundation’s attempt to go beyond prose in Wikipedia pages and provide a reference data source. An obvious problem is that any such data source needs an underlying model of the world, and that sometimes it is not only hard to gain…

  • WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 Proceedings Published!

    The WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 proceedings have been made available online. Please see below for the table of contents, including through-clickable papers. All papers listed can be cited as appearing in the Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (WikiSym + OpenSym 2013). ACM, 2013.

  • Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings [WikiSym 2013]

    Abstract: The organic growth of wikis requires constant attention by contributors who are willing to patrol the wiki and improve its content structure. However, most wikis still only offer textual editing and even wikis which offer WYSIWYG editing do not assist the user in restructuring the wiki. Therefore, “gardening” a wiki is a tedious and…

  • On the Technology Behind the Wikipedia Sexism Debate on “American Women Novelists”

    The English Wikipedia is currently embroiled in a debate on sexism (local copy), because of classifying female American novelists as “American Women Novelists” while leaving male American novelists in the more general category “American Novelists”, suggesting a subordinate role of female novelists. I find this debate regrettable for the apparent sexism but also interesting for…

  • Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia [WikiSym 2011]

    Abstract: The heart of each wiki, including Wikipedia, is its content. Most machine processing starts and ends with this content. At present, such processing is limited, because most wiki engines today cannot provide a complete and precise representation of the wiki’s content. They can only generate HTML. The main reason is the lack of well-defined…