SoNet Blog
Social Networking research group in FBK
Manypedia presented at Wikisym
Mar 18th
I uploaded on slideshare the presentation I gave time ago at Wikisym 2012. It is embedded below. There is a comparison of Points of View across different wikis (such as ecured.cu, the Cuban government official wiki, and Conservapedia, Anarchopedia, veganpedia, …) and a comparisons of the same page across different language Wikipedias thanks to Manypedia (such as “List of controversial issues” in English, Chinese and Catalan Wikipedia, “Human rights in the United States” in English and Chinese, “Osama Bin Laden” in English and Arabic, “Vietnam War” in English and Vietnamese, “Northern Cyprus” in Turkish, Greek and English Wikipedia, “Underwear” in English and Arabic)
Manypedia is online at http://www.manypedia.com.
The paper is at http://www.gnuband.org/papers/manypedia-comparing-language-points-of-view-of-wikipedia-communities/. If you like Manypedia and the paper, please cite it. Thanks!
PhD dissertation on Collective Memories in Wikipedia
Mar 5th
Finally, on December 7 I defended my PhD dissertation on Collective Memories in Wikipedia… Of course I was thrilled: my time as a PhD student at CIMeC had come to an end and I had to wrap up all the work made in these three years in front of the evaluating committee. In summary, I showed that:
- Wikipedia can be the right playground for quantitative and longitudinal studies on collective memory practices, because it encompasses the most important functions of collective memory building;
- Articles about different types of traumatic events, such as natural and human-made disasters, are characterized by specific patterns of emotional language, and more specifically by a higher presence of words related to sadness for the former and higher percentages of words associated to anger and anxiety for the latter; moreover, traumatic events with human causes are also characterized by an increased presence of language related to cognitive activity and to social processes, showing that the need for a comprehensive explanation may be more pressing for human accidents and validating pevious research about the consequences of traumatic events.
- Different linguistic patterns related to affective, cognitive and social processes can be tracked in the Wikipedia talk pages about two specific traumatic events - the London bombings of 2005 and the Egyptian revolution of 2011 – and show an interesting temporal co-evolution. In particular, while affective language and words related to social processes (like words referring to friends and human beings, or suggesting increased communicative interactions) were significantly higher in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings and during on of the most heated days of the Egyptian revolution, the Battle of the Camel. On the contrary, the results regarding to the temporal evolution of the language associated to cognitive activity were quite unexpected but consistent across the two studies: instead of a parallel evolution of words related to cognitive and emotional processes (as in Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004) results showed that the language related to cognitive processes was higher when the emotional language was lower and viceversa. A possible explanation of this specular temporal evolution could be the social context of Wikipedia talk pages, which unlike the individual environments studied by Cohn and colleagues (online personal diaries), is purposefully designed to foster social interactions and communication, influencing the co-evolution of affective and cognitive processes.
After the defence, we had a CIMeC lunch with graduating students, professors and advisors, and in the afternoon there was the graduation and commencement ceremony with Christiane D. Fellbaum as the keynote speaker.
My presentation is on slideshare:
Which Wikipedia pages are edited mainly by females?
Sep 19th
Some time ago we developed Wikitrip, a web tool which shows the world location of editors of a chosen Wikipedia page and also the gender of editors, i.e. how many edits were made by males and females. We released Wikitrip as open source on github and we also deployed 3 live APIs: api.php (various stats about a specific Wikipedia page), api_gender.php (returns timestamp and gender for any edit to a specific Wikipedia page by a registered user that specified his/her gender), api_geojson.php (returns a GeoJSON for anonymous edits on a specific Wikipedia page). If you want to use the APIs in your mashups, we’ll be delighted, more details about the APIs can be found at the end of this blog post.
In fact, today I discovered via Gizmodo that Santiago Ortiz has used our Wikipedia Gender API for creating a fantastic visualization of Wikipedia pages based on how many female and male contributors each of the articles has.
Using the cool visualization you can for example “discover” that currently, out of more than 4 million pages in the English Wikipedia, JUST ONE article is edited more by females than males!!! That article, with 7 male editors and 9 male editors, is Cloth menstrual pad.
Note that the API we released is based on data from Wikipedia and that only users who specified their gender in Wikipedia are counted in (these users are a minority, around 10%). Note also that in our Wikitrip visualization we show a plot with number of edits from gendered users while Santiago show the number of different users. For example in Wikitrip you see that the page Cloth menstrual pad has 62 edits from females and 15 edits from males but the different users who edited the page are 7 male and 9 female.
Now I give you some more info about the APIs released with WikiTrip so that you can use them as well in your mashups if you wish so.
-
Get various stats about a page
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
- year_count: show edit count per month (default: false)
- editors: show unique editors for the page (default: false)
- max_editors: maximum number of editors displayed (only if “editors” option is set)
- anons: show anonymous unique editors (default: false)
- top_ten: show top 10% of editors (default: false)
- top_fifty: top 50 editors (default: false)
-
api_gender.php
Get timestamp and gender for any edit by a registered user that specified his gender on a specific page (might be quite slow)
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
-
api_geojson.php
Get a GeoJSON for anonymous edits on a specific page
Options:
- article: page title
- lang: desidered language (default: en)
- family: wiki family (default: wikipedia)
P.s.: the coder of all Wikitrip awesomeness is the amazing Federico “fox” Scrinzi!
Models of economic production, Encarta vs Wikipedia, and sober economists
Sep 5th
An excerpt from Dan Pink’s TED talk “The surprising science of motivation”
The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it.
Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, and said, “Hey, I’ve got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?” 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.
WikiSym 2012
Aug 28th
WIkiSym 2012
It’s been a while since my last post but things have been a little busy with the work for the thesis, paper writing, etc… but here we are again, one year later at WikiSym 2012 in Linz, Austria. And here’s the presentation I gave yesterday on the Psychological processes underlying Wikipedia representations of natural and manmade disasters: we used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count by Pennebaker and colleagues to assess the percentages of words related to different psychological categories in the English Wikipedia’s articles about traumatic/non traumatic events, old/recent events, and natural/human-made disasters. It turns out that Wikipedia’s articles talking about human-made disasters contain a higher presence of language related to anger and anxiety, while those about natural disasters contain a significantly higher percentage of words related to sadness. Which is consistent with what past research in the real world has found about man-made disasters triggering more focused anger and having more widespread consequences on people’s physical and psychological health. This could also be related to the “perception of control” introduced by Baum (1986): loosing control when there are expectation for it (as in the case of human-made disasters, which are usually perceived as a loss of control over technology or other social situations) is associated to stress arousal, while when something happens but you don’t expect to have any sort of control over it (as it happens with natural disasters, which are usually perceived as uncontrollable events) is related to helplessness and passive behavior.
The presentation is also here on slideshare:
MIT Press book “The Reputation Society” (containing a chapter by me) is out!
Jan 24th
The MIT Press I contributed to with a chapter is out! It is titled “The Reputation Society: how online opinions are reshaping the offline world” and edited by Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey.
It is available on MIT press and on Amazon.
The chapter I wrote is titled Trust It Forward: Tyranny of the Majority or Echo Chambers? and on it I ramble about objectivity/subjectivity, minorities/majorities, etc.
If reputation systems weight all perspectives similarly, they may devolve into simple majority rule. But if they give each user reputation scores that take only other similar users’ opinions into account, they run the risk of becoming “echo chambers” in which like-minded people reinforce each others’ views without being open to outside perspectives. Massa discusses design choices and trust metrics that may help balance these two extremes and the broader implication for our future societies.
The book received endorsements by people I really admire.
“As our societies expand from local villages to global networks, our ways of assessing and sharing reputation—the foundation of trust and community—must also evolve, but how? The thoughtful and thought-provoking essays in The Reputation Society bring a wide range of perspectives to this question, including the design of technological solutions, applications in philanthropy, science and governance, and warnings about the loss of privacy and autonomy. It is a fascinating collection of readings not only for scholars, but for anyone interested in the dynamics of the reviews and recommendations that shape our decisions—or in the future of how we will judge and be judged.”
—Judith Donath, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University
“Today is tomorrow’s yesterday. These provocative essays, by some of the leading thinkers in the domain of reputation systems, illuminate how reputations regulate actions across time and social distance and point to the opportunities and obstacles that reputation systems present for commerce and democracy.”
—Paul Resnick, Professor, University of Michigan School of Information
“The Reputation Society enriches the discussion of reputation by bringing together technologists, philosophers, legal scholars, and industry leaders to sort through the promise and perils we face today. It covers the practical, for those interested in the nuts and bolts of the challenges we face today, and the theoretical, for those looking to engage in broader discussions of the ethical and moral concerns. In short, a terrific and enlightening read!”
—Danielle Keats Citron, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law
The list of my co-authors is also very delightful.
Trust, reputation systems, and the immune system of democracy / Craig Newmark –
Building the reputation society / Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey, & Yi-Cheng Zhang –
Designing reputation systems for the social web / Chrysanthos Dellarocas –
Web reputation systems and the real world / Randy Farmer –
An inquiry into effective reputation and rating systems / John Henry Clippinger –
The biology of reputation / John Whitfield –
Regulating reputation / Eric Goldman –
Less regulation, more reputation / Lior Strahilevitz –
The role of reputation systems in managing online communities / Cliff Lampe –
Attention philanthropy : giving reputation a boost / Alex Steffen –
Making use of reputation systems in philanthropy / Marc Maxson & Mari Kuraishi –
The measurement and mismeasurement of science / Michael Nielsen –
Usage-based reputation metrics in science / Victor Henning, Jason Hoyt, and Jan Reichelt –
Open access and academic reputation / John Willinsky –
Reputation-based governance and making states “legible” to their citizens / Lucio Picci –
Trust it forward : tyranny of the majority or echo chambers? / Paolo Massa –
Rating in large-scale argumentation systems / Luca Iandoli, Josh Introne, & Mark Klein –
Privacy, context, and oversharing : reputational challenges in a Web 2.0 world / Michael Zimmer & Anthony Hoffman –
The future of reputation networks / Jamais Cascio –
“I hope you know this is going on your permanent record” / Madeline Ashby & Cory Doctorow.
The cover of the book reads as follows.
In making decisions, we often seek advice. Online, we check Amazon recommendations, eBay vendors’ histories, TripAdvisor ratings, and even our elected representatives’ voting records. These online reputation systems serve as filters for information overload. In this book, experts discuss the benefits and risks of such online tools.
The contributors offer expert perspectives that range from philanthropy and open access to science and law, addressing reputation systems in theory and practice. Properly designed reputation systems, they argue, have the potential to create a “reputation society,” reshaping society for the better by promoting accountability through the mediated judgments of billions of people. Effective design can also steer systems away from the pitfalls of online opinion sharing by motivating truth-telling, protecting personal privacy, and discouraging digital vigilantism.
Article about Manypedia on Italian newspaper Corriere
Jan 24th
I’ve been interviewed by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera about Manypedia (and Wikitrip). If you know Italian, you can read the resulting article titled “Every Wikipedia represents its own culture: even the concept of controversiality is controversial” at corriere.it. The journalist liked to stress the fact both Manypedia and WikiTrip are open source, which is a good thing I think.
Paolo’s presentation at WikiSym 2011
Nov 10th
At the beginning of October Paolo flew to California to present our paper on Collective memory building of North African uprisings in Wikipedia at WikiSym 2011. In his presentation, he showed that collective memory building processes happen in Wikipedia, providing evidence of the large participation to the editing of articles and talk pages about the 2011 Egyptian revolution in different language versions of Wikipedia. Through the analysis of millions of edits, it is now possible to study history (also starting from current events), which is written in Wikipedia in a decentralized way by thousands of users.
Paolo proposed possible research directions to study these processes, also from a quantitative perspective, which could fruitfully integrate the qualitative evaluation of articles’ content and discussions in the talk pages. Below you can find he’s presentation:
My presentation at Wikisym: studying (current) history by analyzing Wikipedia
Nov 9th
Wikisym was a great conference! Below you can find my presentation about the paper on Collective memory building in Wikipedia. During the presentation, I provided evidence and possible research lines in order to argue how it is becoming possible to study history (of current events) by analyzing what it is written about these events by thousands of editors on Wikipedia.