WikiChanges : exposing Wikipedia revision activity

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2008

Authors

Sérgio Sobral Nunes (Author) FEUP; Maria Cristina de Carvalho Alves Ribeiro (Author) FEUP; Gabriel de Sousa Torcato David (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: 4th International Symposium on Wikis

Pages: 1-4

WikiSym2008

Porto, 8 a 10 de Setembro de 2008

Indexing

Scopus - 22 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

CORDIS: Humanities > Information science > Information management

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-007-V0V

DOI: 10.1145/1822258.1822292

Abstract (EN): Wikis are popular tools commonly used to support distributed collaborative work. Wikis can be seen as virtual scrapbooks that anyone can edit without having any specific technical know-how. The Wikipedia is a flagship example of a real-word application of wikis. Due to the large scale of Wikipedia it¿s difficult to easily grasp much of the information that is stored in this wiki. We address one particular aspect of this issue by looking at the revision history of each article. Plotting the revision activity in a timeline we expose the complete article¿s history in a easily understandable format. We present WikiChanges, a web-based application designed to plot an article¿s revision timeline in real time. WikiChanges also includes a web browser extension that incorporates activity sparklines in the real Wikipedia. Finally, we introduce a revisions summarization task that addresses the need to understand what occurred during a given set of revisions. We present a first approach to this task using tag clouds to present the revisions made.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 4