Gender differences in information behavior concerning Wikipedia,an unorthodox information source?

This study examined gender differences in information behavior concerning Wikipedia. Data were collected using a Web survey in spring 2008. The study used a convenient sample that consisted of students who had taken an introductory undergraduate course at a large public university in the Midwestern United States. A total of 134 out of 409 students participated in the study. As information consumers, male students used Wikipedia more frequently than their female counterparts did. With respect to the purposes of Wikipedia use, male students used Wikipedia for entertainment or idle reading more than their female counterparts, while there were no gender differences regarding Wikipedia use for other purposes. Male students were more likely to discount the risks involved when using Wikipedia information compared to their female counterparts. Furthermore, male students had higher ratings than female students regarding most aspects of Wikipedia, including outcome expectations, perceptions about its information quality, belief in the Wikipedia project itself, emotional states while using Wikipedia, confidence in evaluating information quality, and further exploration. Finally, there was no gender difference regarding the number of years of Wikipedia use. However, male students reported having more positive experiences with the information quality of Wikipedia than their female counterparts. Overall, the findings of this study were consistent with those of previous studies concerning gender. Given the acknowledgment of the knowledge value of Wikipedia in recent literature, it seems that there are more advantages to using Wikipedia than there are disadvantages. The current study shows that male students seem to enjoy such benefits more than female students and may have more opportunities to develop their information literacy skills than female students by actively using Wikipedia. This suggests that educators need to encourage female students in particular to explore Wikipedia strategically as an initial information source so that they can develop their information literacy skills for unconventional sources.     

维基百科知识分类结构演化规律研究

维基百科分类页面所构成是一种在用户自发的协同编辑行为下建立起来的、具备自组织特性的全新知识分类结构。依据维基百科分类结构特点,将其看成是以分类页面为领域知识节点,以节点间相互包含关系为边的领域知识分类结构。采用自回避随机游走方法(self-avoiding random walks)构建领域知识节点熵测量模型,从而测定领域知识结构中心领域知识和边缘领域知识节点,以研究领域知识节点随时间演化的规律。研究表明,大多数情况下,多样性熵值越大的节点,越趋向于知识结构的中心领域知识,且其创建的时间也越长;处于相同社团结构中的节点间存在关联关系,使得它们的多样性熵值表现出相似的变化趋势。     

Issues of cross-contextual information quality evaluation—The case of Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias

An initial exploration into the issue of information quality evaluation across different cultural and community contexts based on data collected from the Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias showed that different Wikipedia communities may have different understandings of and models for quality. It also showed the feasibility of using some article edit-based metrics for automated quality measurement across different Wikipedia contexts. A model for measuring context similarity was developed and used to evaluate the relationship between similarities in sociocultural factors and the understanding of information quality by the three Wikipedia communities.     

A Different Ball Game: Physical Education Students' Experiences in Librarian-led Wikipedia Assignments

Wikipedia editing assignments in the classroom provide unique transformative learning experiences to students and educators alike. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In lieu of a traditional essay or research paper, professors are increasingly asking their students to edit Wikipedia articles. This active and collaborative pedagogical approach encourages the development of a host of student skills: information literacy, critical thinking, media literacy, collaboration, online communication, writing, and critical digital literacy skills.This study examines Kinesiology and Physical Education students' perceptions, attitudes, and experiences before and after completing a librarian-led Wikipedia assignment. Using modified pre- and post-surveys the authors surveyed 63 Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) students completing a librarian-led Wikipedia assignment in an Educational and Counselling Psychology course. While overall the experience was positive and met most student expectations, they are not committed to editing Wikipedia in the future, nor are they necessarily in favour of replacing the traditional research essay with Wikipedia editing assignments.     

Use of Louisiana's Digital Cultural Heritage by Wikipedians

Analysis of how cultural heritage institutions' (CHI) digital assets are being cited on Wikipedia can be beneficial to understanding user needs and interests as well as priorities for collection development and digitization. This case study details an analysis of Wikipedia links to online resources from Louisiana cultural heritage institutions in order to determine what types of cultural heritage resources users are citing on Wikipedia, what is the content of the Wikipedia articles with Louisiana CHI citations, and how this can influence the work of CHI. The results of the study include findings that digital library items and archival finding aids are the most cited sources from cultural heritage institutions on Wikipedia and are particularly popular for Louisiana-specific Wikipedia articles on society and the social sciences and culture and the arts. Some possible strategies for determining digitization and collection development priorities based on these findings are also detailed.     

维基百科社群发展策略研究

本文从基于Wiki协作式创作系统的技术平台、基于多层级权限分配机制的志愿者管理模式、基于开放式编撰和中立性观点及免费共享等基本原则的内容发展方针等三个方面,阐述了维基百科的社群发展策略。     

外部因素对维基百科序化过程的影响分析

维基百科是一个开放的知识系统,从而不可避免地受到外部环境的影响。本文以维基百科为研究对象,选择了"可信度危机"和"政府限制访问"等若干具有代表性的因素,研究了外界环境对维基百科序化过程的影响。结果表明,外部因素的确影响了维基百科的发展,但是并没有遏制其发展趋势。     

Mediating at the Student–Wikipedia Intersection

ABSTRACT

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is openly edited by registered users. Wikipedia editors can edit their own and others' entries, and some abuse of this editorial power has been unveiled. Content authors have also been criticized for publishing less than accurate content. Educators and students acknowledge casual use of Wikipedia in spite of its perceived inaccuracies. Use of the online encyclopedia as a reference resource in scholarly papers is still debated. The increasing popularity of Wikipedia has led to an influx of research articles analyzing the validity and content of the encyclopedia. This study provides an analysis of relevant articles on academic use of Wikipedia. This analysis attempts to summarize the status of Wikipedia in relation to the scope (breadth) and depth of its contents and looks at content validity issues that are of concern to the use of Wikipedia for higher education. The study seeks to establish a reference point from which educators can make informed decisions about scholarly use of Wikipedia as a reference resource.     

基于中文维基百科的领域概念相关性研究

以提高领域概念相关性判断的准确度为研究宗旨, 提出综合利用中文维基百科的分类体系结构和概念释义内容进行概念间语义相关度计算的方法.选取中文维基百科分类体系下的图书情报领域的概念为实验对象, 将基于分类信息和文本信息的加权算法与单独基于分类信息的语义距离算法和信息量算法, 以及基于文本信息的文本重叠算法进行对比分析.实验结果表明:加权算法能取得更好的效果, 可为实现面向领域的信息检索、领域本体构建等应用提供重要技术支持.     

Reranking web search results for diversity

Search engine results are often biased towards a certain aspect of a query or towards a certain meaning for ambiguous query terms. Diversification of search results offers a way to supply the user with a better balanced result set increasing the probability that a user finds at least one document suiting her information need. In this paper, we present a reranking approach based on minimizing variance of Web search results to improve topic coverage in the top-k results. We investigate two different document representations as the basis for reranking. Smoothed language models and topic models derived by Latent Dirichlet?allocation. To evaluate our approach we selected 240 queries from Wikipedia disambiguation pages. This provides us with ambiguous queries together with a community generated balanced representation of their (sub)topics. For these queries we crawled two major commercial search engines. In addition, we present a new evaluation strategy based on Kullback-Leibler divergence and Wikipedia. We evaluate this method using the TREC sub-topic evaluation on the one hand, and manually annotated query results on the other hand. Our results show that minimizing variance in search results by reranking relevant pages significantly improves topic coverage in the top-k results with respect to Wikipedia, and gives a good overview of the overall search result. Moreover, latent topic models achieve competitive diversification with significantly less reranking. Finally, our evaluation reveals that our automatic evaluation strategy using Kullback-Leibler divergence correlates well with α-nDCG scores used in manual evaluation efforts.     

Hitching wagons to stars: celebrity,metonymy, hegemony,and the case of Will Smith

Representations of celebrities operate as politically and culturally significant resources for the construction, regulation, and even contestation of hegemonic discourses about race and gender in the United States. Not simply meaningful or important to fans, star images may also provide resources to critics aiming to interrogate and intervene against potentially oppressive cultural norms. Forwarding an approach called metonymic criticism, this essay argues that the associative logic of metonymy plays a central role in both the articulation of celebrity personae and the operations of hegemonic discourse formations. The analysis develops by considering the case of a star whose public image has unique probative value for studying the intersecting discourses of race and gender in US culture: Will Smith.     

LEGITIMIZING WIKIPEDIA

Within only a few years, the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become one of the most popular websites in the world. At the same time, Wikipedia has become the subject of much controversy because of inaccuracies and hoaxes found in some of its entries. Journalists, therefore, have remained skeptical about the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia's information, despite the fact that research has consistently shown an overall high level of accuracy compared to traditional encyclopedia. This study analyzed the framing of Wikipedia and its use as a news source by five US national newspapers over an eight-year period. A content analysis of 1486 Wikipedia references in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Christian Science Monitor found that Wikipedia is framed predominantly neutral and positive, and that it is increasingly used as a news source. By framing Wikipedia as credible and accurate, the newspapers help legitimize the use of the online encyclopedia. By allowing Wikipedia to influence their news agendas as a source, the newspapers confirm the growing reliability of Wikipedia.     

基于语义网络社团划分的中文文本分类研究

为减少一词多义现象及训练样本的类偏斜问题对分类性能的影响,提出一种基于语义网络社团划分的中文文本分类算法。通过维基百科知识库对文本特征词进行消歧,构建出训练语义复杂网络以表示文本间的语义关系,再次结合节点特性采用K-means算法对训练集进行社团划分以改善类偏斜问题,进而查找待分类文本的最相近社团并以此为基础进行文本分类。实验结果表明,本文所提出的中文文本分类算法是可行的,且具有较好的分类效果。     

LibX: The Small but Mighty Button for E-Resource Discovery and Access

LibX is an open-source browser extension that pushes access to a library’s e-resources and services out to users wherever they are on the Internet (e.g., Amazon, Wikipedia). In Fall 2012, University of Connecticut (UConn) Libraries unveiled their instance of LibX along with homegrown user guides and instructional materials, as well as targeted marketing and promotion efforts. In this session, the presenters described the successes and challenges of UConn’s LibX implementation and promotion, as well as an analysis of LibX.     

维基百科检索系统研究

[目的/意义]维基百科是众包模式应用的杰出范例,研究维基百科的检索系统有助于促进以众包方式编纂的同类网络百科全书的研究和发展。[方法/过程]通过对维基百科检索结构的系统描述,分析发现在众包编纂模式下维基百科检索系统的3个区别性特征。在此基础上,探讨维基百科检索系统存在的问题。[结果/结论]维基百科检索系统的区别性特征包括：检索系统功能的多样性、检索系统的开放性、编辑历史的可检索性;维基百科检索系统存在着超链接密度较高、网络文献问题频现、参见系统内容缺乏一致性等问题。未来的研究应在检索方式的设置和管理方面进行探讨。国内同类网络百科全书应在汲取维基百科先进经验的同时,结合自身检索系统设置的实际情况,不断完善各种检索途径的功能。     

Entity ranking in Wikipedia: utilising categories,links and topic difficulty prediction

Entity ranking has recently emerged as a research field that aims at retrieving entities as answers to a query. Unlike entity extraction where the goal is to tag names of entities in documents, entity ranking is primarily focused on returning a ranked list of relevant entity names for the query. Many approaches to entity ranking have been proposed, and most of them were evaluated on the INEX Wikipedia test collection. In this paper, we describe a system we developed for ranking Wikipedia entities in answer to a query. The entity ranking approach implemented in our system utilises the known categories, the link structure of Wikipedia, as well as the link co-occurrences with the entity examples (when provided) to retrieve relevant entities as answers to the query. We also extend our entity ranking approach by utilising the knowledge of predicted classes of topic difficulty. To predict the topic difficulty, we generate a classifier that uses features extracted from an INEX topic definition to classify the topic into an experimentally pre-determined class. This knowledge is then utilised to dynamically set the optimal values for the retrieval parameters of our entity ranking system. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia can significantly improve entity ranking effectiveness, and that topic difficulty prediction is a promising approach that could also be exploited to further improve the entity ranking performance.     

自由人的自由联合:维基百科评介

介绍维客技术及维基百科的由来与发展;通过与传统百科全书的比较,分析维基百科大众编撰、免费共享、动态更新及内容中立等4个特征。并简述来自社会各个领域对维基百科条目可靠性和权威性的质疑与批判,基于维基百科的发展政策及目标,从实证和人文价值观等角度对维基百科的发展现状与前景进行评价及反思,总结维基百科的研究意义,带给人们的启示。     

The Temple and the Bazaar: Wikipedia as a Platform for Open Authority in Museums

Museums today grapple with the reconciliation of traditional models of authority with the expectation to incorporate new voices in cultural interpretation. At the same time, society is increasingly empowered by a social Web that provides collaboration, connectivity, and openness. This paper frames the dialogue of authority and openness around parallel theories within the museum and technology communities, offering Wikipedia as a platform for facilitating new perspectives in collaborative knowledge‐sharing between museums and communities. Expanding on the metaphors of the museum as “the Temple and the Forum” and the Web as “the Cathedral and the Bazaar,” this essay argues that issues of democratization, voice, and authority in museums can be addressed through Wikipedia's community, process, and its potential as a model for a new Open Authority in museums.     

基于半衰期的维基百科演化分析

本文将半衰期的理论与计算方法引入到对维基百科的研究中,以时间为标度揭示了中文维基百科的发展演化规律。从条目、参与者、编辑次数、链接等角度讨论了中文维基百科的总量半衰期和年度增量半衰期,在此基础上计算了各基本元素总量半衰期与总时间的关系,明确地展示了中文维基百科的发展演化规律。     

HOSTING THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE,HOSTING THE PUBLIC

In this paper, we examine the inverse and converging movement of two sets of institutions: news organizations, as they find that part of their mission necessarily includes hosting an unruly user community that does not always play by the norms of journalism; and online media platforms and social networks designed for users to share content, as they find that the content being shared is often much like news, some of which challenges their established user guidelines. We draw on in-depth interviews to understand how each industry is finding itself increasingly on the other's turf and facing the challenges and tensions the other has long coped with, but from its own distinct vantage point. From this we explore the ways in which the roles of news provision and community management are increasingly intermingled—in ways that will continue to have an impact on both news organizations and social media platforms, along with their audiences and users.