Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

[Brian Keegan]

Thanks for the note and provocative questions. I think assuming the lack of
explicit communication disqualifies the activity as collaboration is a very
narrow view of collaboration. Indeed, in the context of a breaking news
event the talk pages is a poor approximation of the actual communication
taking place. For example, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami article
at 8:00 
UTCon
March 11 covers substantially more information than is reflected on
the
talk page at the same
time
while
the revision comments for this period are especially rich. My previous
research suggests that power editors who dominate contributions to these
article resort to more synchronous channels such as IRC to coordinate their
work (paper ) which bears
out your argument that editors resort to other backchannels to coordinate
this work.

Moreover, a substantial amount of collaboration takes place through
implicit work of reading revision comments and monitoring revision
histories which leads to the development of develop shared mental models of
the work to be done and transactive memory systems of who is doing what.
Furthermore, theories of stigmergy suggests that the artifact (like the
article) itself can encode consensus and coordinate subsequent action in
distributed information work absent any explicit communication
(link,
link ,
link ). The work that has
already been done and still needs to be done is encoded within the object
itself (e.g., broken template needing closing braces) without the need for
any communication. I think this is absolutely collaboration.

Walking down the street or asynchronously editing a document with several
dozen other editors are examples of collaboration which demand collective
mind and heedful interrelation. Borrowing from Weick and
Roberts (1993):
"actors construct their actions (don't run into other people while en
route) understanding the system consists of connected actions by themselves
and others (other people are trying to do the same thing) and interrelate
their actions within the system (try to walk the same speed as the people
around you)." This "stampede" may not require much in the way of higher
cognition as with jointly writing a research paper, but it's absolutely the
joint accomplishment of work towards a shared goal which is collaboration
in my book.

What the analysis attempts to capture at a very coarse level is not the
happenstance interactions (the peripheral nodes and one-off links) but
rather the emerging framework of "silent collaboration" as some editors
have a consistent tendency to have many interactions, repeatedly interact,
or are connected to particular kinds of other editors. Regarding the
coarseness of the analysis, you would be right to point out that the fact
that someone makes a change once after another user is almost certainly a
spurious interaction: they could have been editing completely different
parts of the article. Work by Aaron Halfaker
(paper)
and Jeff Rzeszotarski
(paper)
has each looked at content-level changes which is substantially more
persuasive in this regard. However, the work editors do in the long-run is
necessarily contingent on the work others have done before them and is what
I believe emerges into the clusters of sustained interaction which my
method captures (not just edit wars). To the (very limited) extent these
interactions are the function of edit warring (the "Possibly related
events" in early history of the 2011 Norway
attacksis
an excellent example of it), other editors intervene and also make
changes. These subsequent and sustained dyadic interactions are potentially
illustrative of important dynamics such as polarization, centralization,
specialization, etc. which emerge from successive interactions.

As you suggest, my post and much of my other research is absolutely missing
a crucial qualitative component of what motivates these editors, how they
make sense of others' contributions, and how they accomplish this work.
Some forthcoming research of mine suggests that these articles are not
one-off collaborations but there are editors who are effectively dedicated
to coordinating and collaborating on breaking news articles. Further work
in the domain should explore the extent to which this implicit work
involves repeated repertoires of action (e.g

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

[Kerry Raymond]

I think this study of the "collaborative" dynamics is interesting, but I have 
some questions.

Do we have any evidence that collaboration is actually occurring? With breaking 
news like this, it may just be many individuals operating independently? 
Collaboration pretty much requires a communication channel, but internal to WP 
the only visible communication is the talk page (and perhaps user talk pages). 
We might infer that editors participating in a consensus-building thread in the 
talk page (or user talk pages) are acting collaboratively in relation to the 
issue under discussion (but not necessarily more widely. However, if editors 
are disagreeing in a talk page thread, it is hard to say whether their edits in 
relation to that issue are collaborative or "warring" (deliberating seeking to 
undo another) or simply independent (using their best judgement at that 
moment). Nor can we readily judge if editors not writing on the talk page might 
still be reading it and thus informing their actions based on those discussions 
- that is, might be acting in "silent collaboration". Nor can we tell if any of 
the editors are having private conversations via email or other means . As 
communication takes time, in a breaking news situation editors might prefer to 
just "be bold" and keep the page as up-to-date as possible, using their own 
"best judgement" rather than "waste" time arguing on the talk page.


Can we consider reversions and mutual reversions in a "breaking news" situation 
as revealing an "edit war"? With many editors simultaneously active, I think 
you have to consider that it is just a stampede that is taking place. It's a 
bit like "walking together". If just two people walk down a street, we can say 
pretty clearly if they are walking together (they will remain in close 
alignment most of the time). But if a crowd of people are walking down the 
street, it's hard to say that two people are walking together - they might just 
be forced into that alignment by the crowd. I think we have the same situation 
with reversions with simultaneous editors operating in a breaking news 
situation; many individuals acting independently and reversions might not be 
intentional.

>From a research perspective, doing a survey or interview of some of the 
>editors on their perspective of what was going on might be informative to 
>provide better interpretation of the data. Given the 
>protection/semi-protection of the page means it is probably possible to 
>contact many of them via their user talk page. It would be very interesting to 
>know if those who appear to be involved in an edit war saw it as an edit war, 
>and to what extent they thought they were acting collaboratively and  by what 
>means was that collaboration fostered (e.g. explicit discussions on talk page, 
>or more implicit, e.g. adopting a consistent style established by other 
>editors).

Kerry

From: wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org 
[mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Taha Yasseri
Sent: Monday, 23 July 2012 3:20 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

I resend my previous message that is not delivered yet. Sorry for potential 
duplicate receiving .

Now, after two days, there are 30 Wikipedia language editions who have covered 
the event (have an article on it).
Here: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/blog.html, see the dynamics, i.e. number of 
covering WPs versus time, measured in minutes and counted from the event time 
(t=0).
For those who are familiar with spreading phenomena, the curve comes as no 
surprise. What is surprising, is the fast reaction of Latvian  (3rd place) and 
rather late reaction of Japanese Wikipedia (the latter is most likely related 
to time zone effects).

As I did this in a very unprofessional way, errors and miscalculations are 
expected, please notify if find.

bests,
.taha

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Dario Taraborelli 
mailto:dtarabore...@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on this 
article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most importantly the 
fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're mostly focused on 
scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study how enabling reader 
feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking news articles, 
especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous contributors don't have a 
voice.

Dario



On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:


It is currently semiprotected, there were IP edits when it was first created. 
But according to the logs it was fully protected for a while due to IP 
vandalism. However the edit history only shows it going to semi protection, but 
there were some moves which have complicated things

WSC
On 21 July 2012 22:46, Taha Yasseri 
mailto:taha.yas...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!

On Sat, 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

[Taha Yasseri]

I resend my previous message that is not delivered yet. Sorry for potential
duplicate receiving .

Now, after two days, there are 30 Wikipedia language editions who have
covered the event (have an article on it).
Here: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/blog.html, see the dynamics, i.e. number of
covering WPs versus time, measured in minutes and counted from the event
time (t=0).
For those who are familiar with spreading phenomena, the curve comes as no
surprise. What is surprising, is the fast reaction of Latvian  (3rd place)
and rather late reaction of Japanese Wikipedia (the latter is most likely
related to time zone effects).

As I did this in a very unprofessional way, errors and miscalculations are
expected, please notify if find.

bests,
.taha


On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Dario Taraborelli <
dtarabore...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on
> this article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most
> importantly the fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're
> mostly focused on scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study
> how enabling reader feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking
> news articles, especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous
> contributors don't have a voice.
>
> Dario
>
>
>
> On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>
> It is currently semiprotected, there were IP edits when it was first
> created. But according to the logs it was fully protected for a while due
> to IP vandalism. However the edit history only shows it going to semi
> protection, but there were some moves which have complicated things
>
> WSC
>
> On 21 July 2012 22:46, Taha Yasseri  wrote:
>
>> Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri wrote:
>>
>>> Thank you Brian,
>>> Could you also plot the absolute number of edits, and editors, (instead
>>> of the ratio)? Though, since the data is ready I could do it on my own too!
>>>
>>> Surprisingly I see no IP contribution to the article (or may be only
>>> few), not in accord with my expectation for such a topic.
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> .Taha
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Brian Keegan 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 My preliminary analysis of (English) Wikipedia's response to the 2012
 Aurora shootings. Data is available at the bottom:

 http://www.brianckeegan.com/2012/07/2012-aurora-shootings/

 --
 Brian C. Keegan
 Ph.D. Student - Media, Technology, & Society
 School of Communication, Northwestern University

 Science of Networks in Communities, Laboratory for Collaborative
 Technology

 ___
 Wiki-research-l mailing list
 Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l


>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Taha.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Taha.
>>
>> ___
>> Wiki-research-l mailing list
>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>>
>>
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
>
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>


-- 
Taha.
___
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

[Dario Taraborelli]

Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on this 
article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most importantly the 
fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're mostly focused on 
scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study how enabling reader 
feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking news articles, 
especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous contributors don't have a 
voice.

Dario


On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

> It is currently semiprotected, there were IP edits when it was first created. 
> But according to the logs it was fully protected for a while due to IP 
> vandalism. However the edit history only shows it going to semi protection, 
> but there were some moves which have complicated things
> 
> WSC
> 
> On 21 July 2012 22:46, Taha Yasseri  wrote:
> Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri  wrote:
> Thank you Brian,
> Could you also plot the absolute number of edits, and editors, (instead of 
> the ratio)? Though, since the data is ready I could do it on my own too!
> 
> Surprisingly I see no IP contribution to the article (or may be only few), 
> not in accord with my expectation for such a topic.
> 
> cheers,
> .Taha
> 
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Brian Keegan  
> wrote:
> My preliminary analysis of (English) Wikipedia's response to the 2012 Aurora 
> shootings. Data is available at the bottom:
> 
> http://www.brianckeegan.com/2012/07/2012-aurora-shootings/ 
> 
> -- 
> Brian C. Keegan
> Ph.D. Student - Media, Technology, & Society
> School of Communication, Northwestern University
> 
> Science of Networks in Communities, Laboratory for Collaborative Technology
> 
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Taha.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Taha.
> 
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> 
> 
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

___
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l