1. A Side Discussion: The Power of Characters
Who are the most memorable fictitious computer scientists in movies, television, and books?
What are their characteristics?

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

6. 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

7. 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 – famous and enormous

8. 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

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

10. Comparing versions

11. Revision History

12. Rolling back versions

13. Community Organization
Example: Articles For Deletion

14. Community Organization
Example: Featured Article Candidates

15. History Flow Visualization of Wiki Edits

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

17. 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

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

19. Core issues
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)

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

22. Visualizing a Collection of Texts

23. Visualizing Time and Content

25. Visualizing Connections

29. Textual Social Media
A wide variety supporting different categories of communication
Web 2.0 social media enable new roles based on scale and controls
Mining and visualization support access and create new (meta-)media forms