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Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?

Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata?
Wikidata promises to reduce factual inconsistencies across all Wikipedia language versions. It will enable dynamic data reuse and complex fact queries within the world’s largest knowledge database. Studies of the existing participation patterns that emerge in Wikidata are only just beginning. What delineates most of the contributions in the system has not yet been investigated. Is it an inheritance from the Wikipedia peer-production system or the proximity of tasks in Wikidata that have been studied in collaborative ontology engineering? As a first step to answering this question, we performed a cluster analysis of participants’ content editing activities. This allowed us to blend our results with typical roles found in peer-production and collaborative ontology engineering projects. Our results suggest very specialised contributions from a majority of users. Only a minority, which is the most active group, participate all over the project. These users are particularly responsible for developing the conceptual knowledge of Wikidata. We show the alignment of existing algorithmic participation patterns with these human patterns of participation. In summary, our results suggest that Wikidata rather supports peer-production activities caused by its current focus on data collection. We hope that our study informs future analyses and developments and, as a result, allows us to build better tools to support contributors in peer-production-based ontology engineering.
Association for Computing Machinery
Müller-Birn, Claudia
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Karran, Benjamin
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Lehmann, Janette
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Luczak-Rösch, Markus
6cfe587f-e02c-48e8-b2b8-543952ab50a7
Müller-Birn, Claudia
a8cc3353-e22e-4914-bef2-ba95ce30132d
Karran, Benjamin
59dcc4f2-f14f-4de9-a39e-d045ca53dcdb
Lehmann, Janette
e0e0eebb-0fdc-4dc7-ad2f-27874c97f0c9
Luczak-Rösch, Markus
6cfe587f-e02c-48e8-b2b8-543952ab50a7

Müller-Birn, Claudia, Karran, Benjamin, Lehmann, Janette and Luczak-Rösch, Markus (2015) Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: what is Wikidata? In OpenSym ’15: Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. Association for Computing Machinery.. (doi:10.1145/2788993.2789836.).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Wikidata promises to reduce factual inconsistencies across all Wikipedia language versions. It will enable dynamic data reuse and complex fact queries within the world’s largest knowledge database. Studies of the existing participation patterns that emerge in Wikidata are only just beginning. What delineates most of the contributions in the system has not yet been investigated. Is it an inheritance from the Wikipedia peer-production system or the proximity of tasks in Wikidata that have been studied in collaborative ontology engineering? As a first step to answering this question, we performed a cluster analysis of participants’ content editing activities. This allowed us to blend our results with typical roles found in peer-production and collaborative ontology engineering projects. Our results suggest very specialised contributions from a majority of users. Only a minority, which is the most active group, participate all over the project. These users are particularly responsible for developing the conceptual knowledge of Wikidata. We show the alignment of existing algorithmic participation patterns with these human patterns of participation. In summary, our results suggest that Wikidata rather supports peer-production activities caused by its current focus on data collection. We hope that our study informs future analyses and developments and, as a result, allows us to build better tools to support contributors in peer-production-based ontology engineering.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 24 May 2015
e-pub ahead of print date: 19 August 2015
Published date: 19 August 2015
Venue - Dates: OpenSym 2015 - Conference on Open Collaboration, San Francisco, United States, 2015-08-19 - 2015-08-21
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

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Local EPrints ID: 377397
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/377397
PURE UUID: c93f42c9-9a77-43c5-81a9-3bac02dc063f

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Date deposited: 04 Jun 2015 10:47
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:10

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Contributors

Author: Claudia Müller-Birn
Author: Benjamin Karran
Author: Janette Lehmann
Author: Markus Luczak-Rösch

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