Who models the world?: Collaborative ontology creation and user roles in Wikidata

Piscopo, Alessandro and Simperl, Elena (2018) Who models the world?: Collaborative ontology creation and user roles in Wikidata. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interactions. vol. 2, Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1-18 . (doi:10.1145/3274410).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Wikidata is a collaborative knowledge graph which is central to many academic and industry IT projects. Its users are responsible for maintaining the schema that organises this knowledge into classes, properties, and attributes, which together form the Wikidata ‘ontology’. In this paper, we study the relationship between different Wikidata user roles and the quality of the Wikidata ontology. To do so we first propose a framework to evaluate the ontology as it evolves. We then cluster editing activities to identify user roles in monthly time frames. Finally, we explore how each role impacts the ontology. Our analysis shows that the Wikidata ontology has uneven breadth and depth. We identified two user roles: contributors and leaders. The second category is positively associated to ontology depth, with no significant effect on other features. Further work should investigate other dimensions to define user profiles and their influence on the knowledge graph.

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