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 “WikiWikiWeb” 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, PhpWiki, Kwiki etc. And dozens of communities.... Including Wikipedia – well known and enormous

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-to-user email, message notification, RFC, mediation, arbitration. 3RR rule (no more than 3 reverts on a single page)

Comparing Versions

Revision History

Rolling Back Versions

Community Organization Example: Articles For Deletion

Community Organization 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