Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Research:Visualization of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion

This page documents a planned research project.
Information may be incomplete and change before the project starts.


Key Personnel

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  • Danial Javanmardi
  • Lu Xiao

Project Summary

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To view the visualization please visit http://mandanemedia.com/afd/.

[[1]] Visualize the deletion debate ([[2]]). This is a summer research project to partially fulfill the requirement of PhD in Computer Science at Western University. Besides, It is a continues of previous researches have been conducted by Western University's researchers.

The use of computational methods such as natural language processing and visualization techniques is getting more and more attention in studying online deliberations. We present a database tool to facilitate computational content analysis and visualize the relationships in Wikipedia's Article for Deletion (AfD). Our tool offers several unique features. The tool filters human errors and noises in the original textual data and then parses each AfD based on Wikipedia's namespaces. The investigated namespaces of AfDs include main namespace (article), user namespace, category namespace, and Wikipedia namespace (policies and guidelines). The parsed information is stored in a relational database. We have organized two years of AfDs in the English Wikipedia and collected about 40,000 AfDs in a database. We also provide visualizations and analyses to investigate the patterns from the dataset, which is one of the main contributions of the study. In particular, Wikipedia's policies have a high-volume and complex structure, which makes it challenging for newcomer editors to understand them. Our visualization helps newcomer editors to more smoothly contribute to the community. Most of the Wikipedia's editors never read or refer to the Wikipedia's policies and guidelines [6, 5], while, the articles being deleted essentially based on the fact that they did not comply with the policies and guidelines.

Methods

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In the first chapter of the Visualizing Data book, Ben Fry sets up the Data Visualization process as a series of steps:

  1. Acquire (Need Assistance)
  2. Parse
  3. Filter
  4. Mine
  5. Represent
  6. Refine
  7. Interact

As this is an academic research, it might need a group of contributors in deletion debate to validate the final proposed. Also, it might need to get the permission of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels#Researcher.


Dissemination

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It is funded by Prof Lu Xiao at Western University (http://hci.fims.uwo.ca/)

Wikimedia Policies, Ethics, and Human Subjects Protection

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Benefits for the Wikimedia community

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The output of this project has the high potential to facilitate debate in the Article for Deletion among Wikipedia contributors.

Timeline

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It is supposed that the project finished within 5 months.

Funding

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Will be given.

References

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  1. Martin Wattenberg , Fernanda B. Viégas , Katherine Hollenbach, Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromatograms, 2007 http://hint.fm/papers/chromograms.pdf
  2. Fiona Mao, Robert E. Mercer, Lu Xiao, Extracting Imperatives from Wikipedia Article for Deletion Discussions, 2014 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W14/W14-2117.pdf
  3. Lu Xiao, Nicole Askin, What Influences Online Deliberation? A Wikipedia Study, 2014 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23004/full
  4. Robert P. Biuk-Aghai, Cheong-Iao Pang, Yain-Whar Si, Visualizing large-scale human collaboration in Wikipedia, 2014 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X13000617
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Contacts

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Danial Javanmardi:
Email: Sunny_javanmardi@yahoo.com
Personal Website: http://www.mandanemedia.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danial-javanmardi-31706165
Github: https://github.com/mandanemedia

Prof. Dr. Lu Xiao
Email: lxiao24@uwo.ca
Fax: 519-661-3506
Phone: 519-661-2111x88507

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