Collaborative Authoring Environments Experiences Asynchronous vs synchronous editing

Collaborative Authoring Environments • Experiences? • Asynchronous vs. synchronous editing • How to convey the efforts of others? – Tracking changes – Indications of real-time edits • How to manage the potential for conflicting edits? – Locking at different levels of granularity • But that can be very frustrating for users

Operational Transformation (OT) • Pioneered by Ellis and Gibbs in GROVE (1989) • The problem • Initial algorithms did not guarantee convergence (i. e. consistency) for 3 or more editors

History of Wikis • In 1995, Ward Cunningham invented a type of website software – That allowed anyone to modify the site’s content • So this “Wiki. Web” could grow naturally and efficiently – Back to idea from earlier hypertext systems that readers should also be writers • About that name

Wikis • Wikis are collaboratively authored resources • Are often used for (fairly) objective content – User manuals – Wikipedia – Fan / player sites • Include facilities for collaboration – More than a collaborative editor – Talk pages – History pages

Wikis Today • Dozens of wiki engines & wiki companies on the market, including: • “Enterprise wikis” – software for company intranets – Socialtext, confluence • Free wiki hosting services – – Jotspot, Wikia, Wetpaint • Or, download & install your own: – Mediawiki, Php. Wiki, Kwiki etc. • And dozens of communities. . – Including Wikipedia – well known and enormous

Wikipedia • Started in 2001 • Close to 5 million articles in English edition • About 70, 000 regular editors • How many of you use it? • How many have authored/edited?

Communicating in Wikipedia • • The talk pages Page history The Village pump (non-article discussions) The bulletin board Comment pages Mailing lists IRC (internet relay chat) channels

Community Self-Regulation • Quality control features: – recent changes, watch lists, related changes, page histories, user contributions lists • Community features: – talk pages, user profiles, access levels, user-touser email, message notification, RFC, mediation, arbitration. • 3 RR rule (no more than 3 reverts on a single page)

Comparing Versions

Revision History

Rolling Back Versions

Community Organization n Example: Articles For Deletion

Community Organization n Example: Featured Article Candidates

History Flow Visualization of Wiki Edits

Wikipedia article on chocolate Zigzag pattern = argument over certain type of surrealist sculpture exists or not.

Controversial Topics Lead to Social Issues • Article on abortion – Black gashes show points where article has been deleted and replaced with offensive comments – These vandalisms common on controversial articles

But Not Just Controversial Topics • Article on “history” – Black slice shows when a user replaced entire article with word “ha”

Core Issues & Solutions • Socially-constructed text are often open to anyone, “if anyone can edit my text, anyone can ruin my text” – Changes are logged, authors are notified, pages can be restored • Authority is unclear – who “owns” a collaborative document? – Copyleft, Creative Commons, Public Domain • Openness is at odds with typical work habits – Norms are constantly enforced through permanent editing process and agency of socially approved members (e. g. , the sysops)

Building on Social Media • Mining and automatic interpretation – Information retrieval techniques – Language-aware techniques • Personalizing – Information filtering (Infoscope) • Information visualization – Content – Temporal change – Connections

Visualizing a Collection of Texts

Visualizing Time and Content

Visualizing Connections

Social Media • A wide variety supporting different categories of communication • Social media enable new roles based on scale and controls • Mining and visualization support access and create new (meta-)media forms