Thesis/Literature Review

From Researchwiki

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary of the existing literature. It will give the reader a good understanding of the concepts involved in this research.

The chapter will begin by introducing wikis, their history, and development. The topic will be expanded further by explaining the principles behind wiki systems, and some ideals behind their use. The manners in which wikis have been used in various settings will be explored, followed by a survey of the communities who use them. Wiki systems will be compared to other forms of online communication, and finally several common wiki systems will be reviewed.

The chapter will then enter into a discussion of trust, and how it is important online and within wikis. This will be expanded to a discussion of reputation, and several existing online reputation systems will be reviewed.

The chapter will conclude with an introduction to the concept of information attention.

Wikis

Leuf and Cunningham (2001), p. 14 (cited in Schwall 2003) define a wiki from a technological standpoint as

From a conceptual view the Wikipedia Contributors (2006e) describe a wiki as:

There are several major defining points generally accepted to be featured in a wiki system:

• Comprises of a server component, storing and serving pages, as well as a client component (usually a web browser) providing an interface for viewing and changing content
• All/most/some content is editable by its users. The amount of editable content varies from wiki to wiki, to the extent that a system may be called a wiki, where wiki software is used, but content is not made editable to a community.
• Editing is open to all members of a community. This too varies from wiki to wiki. In some editing is completely open, in others only a small group of authorised contributors are permitted.

Several minor points are also important

• Pages can link to each other, as well as pages that do not yet exist
• The editor uses a simple markup which is converted by the server software to standard HTML pages
• The markup language and page layout is simple, so as not to distract from content being the primary feature
• More than just a technological solution, a successful wiki comprises an active community of editors and content-checkers

Wiki History

Ward's Wiki

The first wiki software was a script developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995 (Cunningham 1995a, 2003, 2006a, Sparks 2006), based on some ideas previously explored with HyperCard (Cunningham 2006c). There is some debate over the originality of Ward's idea. Several earlier systems with similar characteristics predate Cunningham's wiki (WardsWiki Community 2005), however it is generally accepted that Ward had no knowledge of these, and these earlier systems did not implement the concept in the scale or radical openness that Ward used.

Ward's system was developed as a supplement to the Portland Pattern Repository (a set of computer language and programming patterns). WardsWiki (as it became known) was built to provide a new documentation system to word processors, intended to support programmers. The new system supported revision control, was easy to use, and was highly automated (Schwall 2003).

This system provided a simple and convenient system for the community to communicate and share information in a fashion that would be useful for later reference to an external visitor. Cunningham built, and further developed this software on a set of principles promoting openness and collaboratively (see 2.2.2.1).

The full name for Ward's idea was WikiWikiWeb. The name wiki-wiki comes from the Hawaiian word meaning quick (Schwall 2003), chosen in preference to "quick web" so as not to conflict with other products such as QuickBasic (Cunningham 2003). The words in the name were concatenated in CamelCaps in the same way as hypertext links were identified by his system. The abbreviation wiki first came from the name of the script, published at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki. Lower case letters were used in accordance with Unix conventions for file naming (Cunningham 2003). Leuf and Cunningham (2001) used "Wiki" to refer to the concept, and "wiki" to refer to the implementation (a specific system, similar to the differences between "Perl" and "perl"). Although the original capitalisation is to write "wiki" in all lower-case, today it has evolved into a noun, and used as a proper-noun when referring to specific systems (Schwall 2003).

Wikipedia

The wiki concept gained widespread attention in 2001, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia (Ma 2006a, Szybalski 2005). A successor of the Nupedia project, Wikipedia implemented the same openness as WardsWiki, open for all to edit, but without the strict editorial control of Nupedia.

Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2000, after motivating the owners of company Bomis (of which Wales was one), to fund his idea of a free-content encyclopedia (Sanger 2005). The encyclopedia would ask academics and other experts of their fields to voluntarily contribute articles for incorporation into the encyclopedia. These articles would go through a seven stage review process, and approved by an academic advisory board before being publicly posted to the site.

Having produced few more than 20 articles after almost a year of development, this slow pace was identified as problem that would be ongoing, prompting Larry Sanger to be assigned to address this problem (Sanger 2005). Larry proposed several ideas deemed as too expensive, before proposing the idea of a wiki like system. Due to the low cost of setting up a wiki, it was trialled, and in January 2001, announced to the (approximately 2000) members of the Nupedia mailing list. Many of these members started directing their energies to this new Wikipedia, and with a steady increase in membership over the months, the project started growing by tens of articles a day (Sanger 2005).

Work was ongoing in Nupedia to improve the process, by reducing the process to a simple submission-acceptance/rejection model, designed to take articles from Wikipedia, validate them, and publish in a separate "authoritative" repository (Sanger 2002). As participation continually declined in favour of Wikipedia, the project eventually ground to a halt, and was officially ended in 2003 (Sanger 2005).

Wikipedia today is still the most popular wiki, ranked the 17th most popular web site globally (Alexa Internet 2006), however the popularity of wiki software has spawned many smaller wikis. Wikia houses the largest collection of wikis, the largest of which are Uncyclopedia (12.2M words), The Psychology Wiki (6.9M words), Wookieepedia (5.8M words) and Memory Alpha (4.8M words) (Wikia Inc. 2006). Other popular wikis exist, such as the Emacs wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki), and the WordPress wiki, now called codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page, originally at http://wiki.wordpress.org/). Many wikis are in existence, like Wards-wiki, to support programmers, very often for use in open source projects such as OpenTTD (http://wiki.openttd.org/) and Bugzilla (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla).

Criticism of Wikipedia

Wikipedia's criticism extends primarily from its promotion as an encyclopedia. Using this label "carries a powerful connotation of reliability" (Orlowski 2005), something which the Wikipedia community can not guarantee. Building an encyclopedia is an admirable and inspiring goal that drives contributors, leading to Wikipedia's success today.

The principal criticism of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is that there are no limits on who may edit content, and the lack of a formal peer review process. The freedom of editability is one of Wikipedia's greatest advantages, and has been the factor that has allowed Wikipedia to grow at such a phenomenal speed. Nupedia employed a strict editorial process of peer review that ultimately brought development to a crawl, where Wikipedia abandoned such limitations completely. This open editing is one of the philosophies of the community, allowing people to contribute anonymously, and refine/fix other contributors work.

Critics say that allowing "any fool" to edit the encyclopedia is a great detriment to the encyclopedia, allowing poor quality content to enter into the encyclopedia. The community however disagrees; poor work is removed or repaired by the community.

Larry Sanger (Sanger 2004) has criticised Wikipedia as being "anti-elitist", lacking respect of the authority of experts who edit Wikipedia. This may be a cultural factor, with many Wikipedia editors being young technically oriented enthusiasts, who also tend to be anti-authoritarian (Raymond 2003).

Wikipedia also suffers from a bias, due to the demographics of the editorship (see 2.3.2.1).

The Wikipedia community acknowledges many problems with the project (Wikipedia Contributors 2006b) and has a detailed set of apologetics (Wikipedia Contributors 2006c) rebutting many of the criticisms. There is some effort on dealing with the more major criticisms, however the major focus is still to build content.

Wiki Philosophy

The wiki idea was born out of Cunningham's HyperCard application, and has since exploded to form vast communities of editors, a popular editing model, wiki supporters and critics. This section will review several perspectives of wiki systems.

Cunningham's Principles

Ward Cunningham originally designed his wiki based on a set of principles (Cunningham 2006b, Ma 2005, Wagner 2004), now featured today as central to any wiki system

The following four important concepts can be identified from Cunningham's principles.

Openness

• (Open, Organic)- editable by anyone

This is the single greatest feature of the wiki concept. The ability for any visitor to edit content is what allows wikis to grow so quickly. The barrier to entry of editing is kept very low. This feature however is the one that draws the greatest criticism. There is no authentication or checking the credentials of the editor. Anything changed becomes visible to the world immediately. The negative implications of this are reduced by the Observable concept below.

Some wikis and wiki software only partially implement this feature. Some require registration for editing, some only to create new pages. Others are completely private, requiring registration or invitation to view content.

Ease

• (Mundane, Universal, Overt, Tolerant)- markup is easy to learn, and familiar to users. Users can not cause an error by entering incorrect markup

This feature also keeps the barrier for entry to editing low, allowing novice users to comfortably use the software with only a very gentle learning curve.

Software is also designed not to produce errors, rather interpret the wikitext as best it can. This ensures a novice user can not "break" a page by entering incorrect text. The content should still be viewable, though the formatting may not be correct.

Precision

• (Unified, Precise, Convergent) - Page names kept simple, clear, concise and understandable by everyone. Duplication is reduced by assigning discrete topic names, and allowing articles to reference other articles.

This makes it easy for readers to find information, and provides a clear indication to writers as to the expected content of an article.

Cunningham recommends article names be contained in a flat namespace, i.e. all pages are equal, there are no sub-pages, where one page can be part of, and hidden by another page. This makes a search mechanism effective, and reduces the complexity of the software. A search for LCD in a hierarchical scheme might result in Science/Electronics/LCD and Science/Mathematics/Fractions/LCD. It also reduces naming conflicts such as Science/Mathematics/Fractions/LCD and Science/Mathematics/ElementryArithmetic/LCD. A flat namespace forces full names to be used such as LiquidCrystalDisplay and LowestCommonDenominator.

Keeping articles focused on discrete topics allows readers to locate and access articles simply and without confusion. This and the linking between pages allows a user to explore a topic by following links to related articles that interest them.

MediaWiki for example allows the creation of hierarchical namespaces, however communities such as Wikipedia generally avoid use of this feature for general articles with the exception made for technical aspects of the wiki such as templates and user sub-pages.

Observance

• (Observable)- Changes can be observed by any other visitor

This builds into the wiki a level of safety from poor edits. It allows contributors to check what changes were made, and decide if they are an improvement or not. A user could also restore a page to a previous version if a change was deemed not to improve the article.

Some wikis will also store along with the changes, the contributor who made the change, adding a level of accountability. This is thought to improve quality by making users accountable for their own work, encouraging them to make positive contributions (David 2004). Such software typically allows users to view another user's (or their own) contributions, by viewing a history of every change made by that user. This is thought by some to be detrimental, and a deviation from an ego-less spirit (Challborn & Reimann 2005), whereby the content is the most important part of the wiki, and any distraction from that is detrimental.

Stallman's Encyclopaedia

Richard Stallman published a vision of a 'Free Universal Encyclopaedia and Learning Resource' (Stallman 1999). These ideas eventually helped shape Wikipedia and its values. The guidelines set out are aimed to ensure the usefulness, and continued success of such an encyclopedia (Stallman 1999).

Many of these values have survived in the modern wiki and Wikipedia. Stallman proposed the encyclopedia should be written by anyone in principle, although most writers would be teachers and outstanding students. Progress will, and should, be made in small steps. Few people have the time to make large contributions, but 'enough ... small contributions can cover the whole range of knowledge' (Stallman 1999). Stallman writes the project would not be a short one, and would take many years to create, but members should keep the original vision, and encourage others to join and contribute.

To ensure the encyclopedia remains free, and always accessible, the encyclopedia must be available to anyone with Internet access, using only free software to display or otherwise access the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia should be available for copying verbatim, including use for translation, and modification.

Finally, there should be no central control of quality, or committee governing creation of the encyclopedia. Stallman writes that such an authority would be too easy to politicize or corrupt. Reviews may be made by 'various groups which will earn respect by their own policies and actions' (Stallman 1999). Peer reviews and endorsements should be encouraged. Such reviews through more traditional means would boost the credibility of the encyclopedia's content. Such endorsements of a work however, would apply only to that version of the work. 'In a world where no one is infallible, this is the best we can do' (Stallman 1999).

Uses

Document and Thread Writing Mode

Leuf and Cunningham (2001) note that there are two formats in which to write within a wiki.

• Document Mode

When a wiki page represents a single concise article, focusing on a specific topic, and usually written in an encyclopedic or third person tone. Typically viewed as community property, free to be updated by other users.

• Thread Mode

Where the wiki page consists of many personal opinions or comments. Such comments are usually signed by the authors with their username. Replies may be posted to such comments, by placing the reply underneath the original comment. Such comments usually remain the "property" of the original author. It is generally considered rude to edit a personal comment, other than obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, or to move it intact, to another more appropriate part of the wiki (Wikipedia Community 2006b).

Individual Uses

Cunningham and Leuf identify the usefulness of wikis as a personal or individual tool. In this form, it might be used as:

• A PIM: A replacement for post-it notes. Are contained in a repository and are easily searchable, categorizable and sortable.
• A notebook, logbook, brainstorming: an unlimited free form notebook. Its associative ability (linking) adds value to the notes.
• address book/Internet link manager
• Collection manager (videos, books etc.): An unstructured 'database'. Leuf and Cunningham (2001), p.86 show how such a wiki can be used to easily answer specific questions by searching notes.
• An "Anywhere Resource": An online wiki that can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.
• Document manager: An editing environment with built-in versioning system

It is worthy of note that this dissertation was written entirely using MediaWiki, using a custom designed extension for citation management, and custom CSS elements to make the visual format suitable for printing in the style dictated by CSU. With the exception of scripts used to collect and process data for presentation in chapter 4, all writing occurred in the wiki, including drafting, collaborative proofing, spell-checking (using the SpellBound Firefox Extension), bibliographic management, note taking, and printing the main body of the text.

Collaborative Uses

The more commonly accepted use of wiki software is as a collaborative tool between a group of people. Such settings may include special-interest groups, academic groups and corporate groups.

These three groups have different requirements of a wiki. Corporate users typically need some form of security infrastructure, such as a firewall, preventing users from outside the company accessing the wiki. Academic and special interest groups may desire to publish information on their wikis, but limit editing to only authorised users.

Actual uses of wikis vary widely. Leuf and Cunningham (2001) explain the planning process that goes into selecting a wiki system, planning its content, and seeding the wiki (providing initial structure and instructional guides (Leuf & Cunningham 2001, tip 4.3)).

Leuf and Cunningham (2001) note several applications of wiki software in a collaborative environment:

• Resource collections: well annotated collection of documents, images, quotes or other data
• Collaborative FAQ: an evolving Q&A site where well-answered questions are filtered into an appropriate section for easy use by visitors
• Project management: An effective central location for communication and planning for a project group. Threaded discussions may be left visible to see reasoning in the decision-making process.
• Web site management: A novel publishing medium, using a wiki but excluding threaded mode discussions, where only authorised users can edit pages. Used in this manner, a wiki is designed to be informative to the general public.
• Online guestbook: Another limited variation, where a small wiki is used to allow visitors to post comments to a web page.

Collaborative wikis may be short or long term. Special wikis, or project wikis may only exist for the period of the project, product, or other activity. Other wikis may be designed for general use over an extended time, such as resource collections, document management wikis, or FAQs, which may run over many years.

Open-content Communities

Open source software presents the best example of open-content communities. The term "open source", coined in 1998 (Open Source Initiative 2006), most commonly refers to open source software, which is software where the human readable source code is released to the general public. Users are normally given permission to use and modify such software (fixing problems or adding features), and after doing so, will often contribute those changes back to the author.

By users of the software contributing their work on improving the software back to the software community it helps all members of the community. Where it is the norm to contribute improvements back to the community, the software develops very quickly. One motivation for contributing to the community are utilitarian progression of the community. The other motivation comes from such societies, in effect forming gift cultures. By contributing to the community, members receive an improved reputation, and boosted ego (Raymond 2000).

The Darwinian "bottom up" approach of online communities have potential that most publishers lack (Graham 2005), the ability to quickly adapt to changes in the industry or to severe problems. 'Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from [making mistakes]. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another' (Graham 2005).

Open-source loosely employs the Delphi method. The Delphi method is 'a method for structuring a group communication process so that the process is effective in allowing a group of individuals, as a whole, to deal with a complex problem.' (Linstone & Turoff 2002). This process is known to produce solutions to complex problems with amazing accuracy (Surowiecki 2004).

The Delphi method is reformulated by Raymond (2001) in the context of open source as "Linus's Law", 'given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone'. That is to say, with a large enough community, there is enough talent distributed in the group, that for any problem, there is a subgroup who will find it easy to solve, and will do so quickly.

Wiki communities

Wiki communities have originated out of developer communities, or "hacker" (in the sense of a software designer or problem solver, see 1.1) communities, and other IT-literate communities who find interest in such open communities as wikis. As such, most members share the attitudes of hacker communities, of 'freedom and voluntary mutual help' (Raymond 2006).

As Raymond (2006) suggests, an individual must truly believe in the ideals of the community to become an accepted member. Large wikis (and to some extent, smaller wikis) however, have room for casual members, who may only visit or contribute occasionally. For these members it can be confusing to understand how to appropriately contribute to a wiki, both technically, in terms of contributing positively, and socially, in terms of which changes are good for the community, and follow policy or group norms.

Leuf and Cunningham (2001) argue that a wiki is nothing without an active community. It is therefore important to encourage new members, to grow a wiki, and to replace retiring members. Given also the evidence that most content in Wikipedia is contributed by casual visitors and infrequent contributors (Swartz 2006), it suggests a greater importance in encouraging visitors to contribute.

Wikipedia Community

The English Wikipedia has 2.2 million registered users (Wikimedia Foundation 2006a). These people at some stage spent the 30 seconds it takes to register an account to edit under. This however, is not a good measure of the size of the community. Many users may be inactive, and similarly, many non-registered users contribute without creating an account. Perhaps a better indicator are the 1009 Administrators of the English Wikipedia. These are active and regular contributors to the project, who have gained a level of trust in the community such that they are granted an extended set of rights. Administrators in Wikipedia have access to delete pages, lock pages from being edited, block users from editing, and are given more powerful methods of reverting edits (Wikipedia Contributors 2006f). Administrators are required in the community to field requests from users to make the above mentioned actions when necessary. They typically perform clean-up operations, such as reverting vandalism, and fixing categories, as well as participating in discussion regarding issues within the project and project policies. To effectively handle these requests, the administrator pool must be at least large enough to support requests from the community.

Anthony (2006) measures the number of Wikipedia editors at about 38,000 members, by counting users who have made more than 5 edits. Seth also supports Swartz (2006) in showing that administrators do not generally make substantial contributions of content to the encyclopedia. They are too busy being "janitors".

The Wikipedia community has defined a total of about 42 policies currently in use, in five categories (Wikipedia Contributors 2006i, 2006k);

• Behavioural
• Content
• Enforcement
• Deletion
• Legal and copyright
• Miscellaneous

distilled into five central "pillars" or summaries (Wikipedia Contributors 2006h):

• Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
• Wikipedia has a neutral point of view
• Wikipedia is free content
• Wikipedia has a code of conduct
• Wikipedia does not have firm rules

These policies are freely editable, like most other pages, by any visitor to the site, and as such, are said to represent consensus of the community, for the reason that if they did not, they would be frequently edited to reflect differing views. To highlight this, the following text is displayed with each policy:

One of the most highly prised policies is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy. This policy states that 'all articles must be written from a neutral point of view, that is, they must represent all significant views fairly and without bias' (Wikipedia Contributors 2006j).

Also defined by the community are a lesser set of policies called guidelines. These are defined similarly to policies, but without as wide an acceptance. The most cited is the "Be bold in updating pages" guideline, encouraging users to make changes without excessive hesitation, citing "Wikis develop faster when people fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure the language is precise, and so on" (Wikipedia Contributors 2006a).

Wikipedia has several policies and guidelines pointing out the fact to keep ego and personal agenda out of editing (Wikipedia Contributors 2006g, 2006l), however with many editors being of the hacker mentality (see 2.2.2.4.1), ego is an important motivator for contributing (Raymond 2001). Challborn and Reimann (2005) note that contribution tracking mechanisms in MediaWiki detract from ideals of 'ego-less spirit-of-wiki purists'. These mechanisms however, are a vital tool in the combating of vandalism, and so too in research into wiki editors and behaviours.

Collaborative Models/Rival Technologies

The wiki began as a simple concept, and started with a very simple design. Ward's wiki, like most wikis, has developed and become an increasingly complex system (Cunningham 2006a), with the addition of features such as revision tracking, security/user accounts, notifications, and syntax enhancements. The concept and usability however remains for the large part unchanged. The simple ability for users to change content has remained while additional features have accumulated around it.

Wikis are a form of communication, facilitated through a document repository. As such a communication tool, it has a suitability for certain tasks. Wikis are best suited to openly distributing and collaborating on textual documents, in groups of any size, where security is not a great concern. Wikis are not a push medium such as email. Checking for new content requires visiting the repository. This limits its ability as a direct form of communication, without the incorporation of another technology such as email notifications or RSS updates.

Email

Email usually operates in a one-to-one mode, but by using cc fields, or a more structured distribution list software, email becomes a one-to-many medium. Email usually has no centralised repository, requiring each participant to organise and filter content themselves. It allows no facility for editing or annotating messages. Email becomes impractical as a document management system with a large group of people as changes must be managed and merged manually. (Leuf & Cunningham 2001)

Shared File/Folder Access

Usually takes the form of a document on a file server editable by all members of a group. Access to the file is often very transparent, such as a network file share. Any document is effectively editable by one user at a time, as changes from multiple users must be resolved manually. Email messages are often used in conjunction to discuss changes, and to alert other editors of updates for review. (Leuf & Cunningham 2001)

Blog

Weblogs originally started as a log of the web, with each entry linking to other sites. It has evolved to become simply a log on the web (Wagner 2004). Weblogs are usually maintained by a single individual or a small group of editors. Content is not editable by anyone other than these authors. Most blogging software facilitates user feedback in the form of short comments. These comments can provide feedback or suggestions on content, but its usefulness for iterative editing is limited.

Forum

A common form of many-to-many conversation. Allows threaded posting in a central space. Members are able to view and post freely, and sometimes all content is available for reading by any Internet user. (Wagner 2004)

Static Web-Site

A one-to-many form of communication. It provides no mechanism for alerting for updates, and no mechanism for feedback. A publisher will often publish an email address as a channel for feedback. Other web site owners may comment about, or provide feedback via their own web sites. This however, requires the original author to find this comment manually. (Wagner 2004)

Wiki Systems

Hundreds of wiki engines exist (WardsWiki Community 2006b, Wikipedia Community 2006a) designed for different uses, different environments, and different audiences. Leuf and Cunningham (2001) detail the difference in syntax of several wiki engines, including the original WardsWiki, the then current WikiWikiWeb, TWiki, Swiki/CoWeb, and Zwiki, as well as describing the use of some of these through case studies of their use in educational and business settings.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki (see figure 1.1) is probably the most recognisable wiki engine, due to its use for the popular Wikipedia, as well as its sister projects run by Wikimedia, and the commercial Wikia. MediaWiki is developed closely with the needs of Wikimedia and the Wikipedia community (MediaWiki.org Wiki Contributors 2006a). Its use on Wikipedia requires the code-base to be stable, and perform well enough to serve about 10,000 pages a second on the Wikimedia server farm. Started in 2001 (Dill 2001) as a replacement for the perl implemented UseModWiki (MediaWiki.org Wiki Contributors 2006b), the MediaWiki engine is written in PHP, using a MySQL back end. MediaWiki provides several features not commonly seen in other wiki engines.

The MediaWiki software allows content to be divided between several namespaces. The default namespace is where the bulk of the content is usually placed. In the case of Wikipedia, this is where the encyclopedic articles are. The project namespace (the name usually follows the name of the wiki) is usually where details about the project, its goals and policies are written. A help namespace provides a space for instructions guiding users on contributing to the project. Each namespace has a partner "talk" namespace, allowing every page in every namespace a partner discussion page, where the articles contents can be discussed and debated, without soiling the actual article. This allows Wikipedia's contributors to discuss or dispute facts, or organise themselves without interfering with the readers of the encyclopedia. A template namespace is used for writing sections of wiki markup that can be included on other pages. These are commonly used for adding banners to pages, such as the "This is a current event" banner, informing the user that the article is likely to be frequently updated.

MediaWiki supports user accounts, letting each user to define their own set of preferences for using the software, and allowing the software to track individual contributions, as well as letting users to define watchlists. Users can use watchlists to select a group of pages they are interested in, requesting the software to alert them when one of those pages is changed by another user.

MediaWiki also supports uploading of files (limited to certain MIME types by default), and a powerful wiki-syntax allowing complex layouts and visual styles. The MediaWiki code-base is commonly reported to be poorly structured, as too is the MediaWiki documentation, however these have been steadily improving (WardsWiki Community 2006a).

c2Wiki

Cunningham's wiki was the original wiki implementation hosted at c2.com. The simple single file perl CGI script uses a flat file database for storing wiki text and search indexes. The c2Wiki has remained largely unchanged. In particular the layout and editing remains the same, although several features have been added. The software now allows users to assign themselves a username used to track a their edits, allows pages to be deleted, keeps a history of all changes to a page, shows if a page is a new page or deleted in RecentChanges and allows edits to be marked as a minor edit when only a small change is made. Some of these features however, have been disabled due to spam abuse (Cunningham 2006a).

It is interesting to note that WardsWiki was not designed around a technical model, rather Cunningham based it on a set of concepts about how the content of the wiki should be treated and how people should interact with the software. (see 2.2.2.1)

UseModWiki

UseMod follows closely the style of Wards Wiki. It is a single file perl implemented flat file database wiki. Its interface is simple like that of the original wiki (UseModWiki Community 2005). UseModWiki includes many desired features, such as recent change lists, page diffs (shows the differences between two versions of a pages), sub-pages (allows a page to act like a separate wiki), interwiki links (allows easy linking to other structured sites such as wikis), page redirects, edit conflict detection and page locking. Its simple implementation (single perl file with a single data directory) makes it easy to set up.

TWiki

TWiki represents a different type of wiki. Promoted as "Enterprise Collaboration Platform", TWiki provides an extensive set of powerful features, such as WYSIWYG editing, fine-grained user control, calendaring, charts, database integration, slide-show presentations and spreadsheets (TWiki Developers 2006). TWiki is implemented in perl, using simple file based storage, or using GNU Revision Control System (RCS). TWikis pages are edited via a form where the user may edit the plain wikitext. Features such as calendars are controlled using special markup in this wikitext. A beta version of a WYSIWYG editor is also released with TWiki for editing pages.

Trust

For the purposes of this research, trust is defined as:

Trust plays an important role in decision making. Jøsang, Ismail and Boyd (2005) point out the distinction between reliability trust (above), and decisional trust, where decisional trust is the 'extent to which one party is willing to depend [on another party or tool or process]' (Jøsang, Ismail & Boyd 2005, pg. 4).

When interacting in the physical world, we rely on a wide range of cues to determine trustworthiness. These cues are mostly absent in online situations, therefore requiring that substitutes be present for trust to form (Jøsang, Ismail & Boyd 2005). Feng, Lazar and Preece (2004) explain how video and audio communication can be almost as good as face to face communication for generating trust, while text based communication however scores poorly.

Trust Within Wikipedia

Shneiderman's definition above shares a few elements with a discussion by Preece (2000), citing three conditions necessary for trust. The conditions are summarised as follows:

• There must be a high probability of future interaction.
• During interactions, members must be able to identify other individuals.
• There must be a record of past interactions.

Wikipedia partially applies these three conditions. Its popularity increasing rapidly (Alexa Internet Inc 2006) would seem to suggest people are not only revisiting the site, but influencing others to visit and revisit.

Wikipedia allows users to create an account, giving that user a unique "name" under which to edit. There are however some flaws. Anonymous users are allowed to edit pages. Until December 2005, anonymous users could also create new pages, however this was removed to reduce the workload of editors checking articles (Wikimedia Foundation 2005). "Anonymous" users however are identified by IP address, tracing them back to their ISP. There is debate (Wikipedia Community 2005) as to if "anonymous" edits are more traceable than edits by registered users. It is possible for users to create multiple accounts, and as IP addresses are only shown (to the public) for editors that are not logged in, it is argued that such use of "sock puppets" ('an additional username used by a Wikipedian who edits under more than one name' Wikipedia Community 2006c) creates a greater level of anonymity than users identified by IP address.

MediaWiki does however keep a history of every edit made to every article, making reverting vandalism easy, and allows the identification of which user made which change.

There are no simple and convenient measures of trust between members, such as the numeric rating eBay gives, however, if one member has reason to doubt the reliability of another member, the means exist to investigate their previous performance.

Osterloh, Rota and Wartburg (2001) show how trust between contributors in open source projects is related to the concept of "swift trust". Swift trust defines a form of trust developed in temporary teams assembled for a common task. As a form of describing shared norms, Osterloh, Rota and Wartburg (2001) argue that swift trust is a suitable explanation of how open source projects develop trust. Members of such communities accept and adhere to "norms of cooperation", and in turn, expect others to. Osterloh, Rota and Wartburg (2001) state that good participation does not necessarily come from interpersonal trust, but rather a perpetual "highly active, proactive, enthusiastic, generative style of action" present in the community (Meyerson, Weick, & Kramer, 1996, p. 180, cited in Osterloh, Rota & Wartburg 2001).

Trust of Wikipedia

High profile cases of libel and vandalism have drawn public attention and scrutiny to Wikipedia's vulnerabilities. McHenry (2004, 2006) presents criticism which represents the public distrust of Wikipedia. He identifies problems with Wikipedia's processes, such as the unproven model of content creation, internal politics, the writing style accepted, and the lack of quality control. Orlowski (2005) and Seigenthaler (2005) detail a high profile example of a problem found in Wikipedia's content, the case of the John Seigenthaler article, which for 132 days contained libellous information against him, contributed by an anonymous author.

Ma (2006b) explains how Wikipedia's similarities to the open source model may affect its perception. While some people buy brand name products, whose quality is guaranteed to a point by the author, some opt for open source products, which have been peer reviewed by a wider range of reviewers, with a wide range of biases and preferences, rather than a single small group of employees. The scale of Wikipedia may however break down this model.

Systemic Bias

Ma (2006b) identifies a systemic bias in the editors of Wikipedia. She reports that Wikipedia users are generally male, technically-inclined, formally educated, speak English, and are from an industrialized nation. These demographics pose some problems.

Wikipedia's goal to provide 'every single person [with] free access to the sum of all human knowledge' (Wikimedia Foundation 2006b), requires two things, firstly that the content is made accessible to all people, and that all knowledge is collected.

The collection of "all human knowledge" is an unachievable ideal, although it is romantic and has served the foundation well so far, but Wikipedia's systemic bias has hindered the goal. In the first years of Wikipedia, the number of articles on Lord Of The Rings eclipsed the number of articles on all of Africa, because that is what interested the community more at the time (Sanger ?, (Kapor 2006)). More recently Ma (2006b) exemplifies the three articles on the Kashmir earthquake, hurricane Katrina, and the Indian ocean earthquake, showing that the neither scale of the incident (number of deaths), or the time of the event influenced the detail of the article, but rather the locality of the event in relation to the bulk of contributors. Similarly she shows that although malaria is a more severe condition than allergies, but the article on allergies is more detailed because more Wikipedia contributors suffer from allergies than malaria.

The second aspect of Wikimedia's goal is that the information is made accessible. This not only means that everyone has access to the content, but that they can read and understand it. Although Wikipedia employs its NPOV policy, the fact remains that any "consensus" reached on Wikipedia, is a consensus of the subset of people who contribute to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's article on combating systemic bias (Wikipedia Community 2006d) shows how intellectuality, religious ideals, and social status, among other aspects, influence the audience for which articles are written. It suggests editors expose themselves to foreign media (newspapers from the locations about which they are writing), to achieve a more balanced view on the facts.

Reputation Systems

Reputations exist to record, manage and summarise data, and to present to the user a metric of another user's standing within the community. These systems are required to allow users to generate trust despite the lack of real world queues. These systems allow any two users, with no prior interaction, or who may only ever interact once, to generate trust.

Slashdot

Slashdot is a news site dedicated to computing and technology, with a very active community of commentators, participating in long and detailed discussions on each news item (Lampe & Resnick 2004). The site adopts what is in essence a blog format, with editors posting about two dozen stories each day (from a pool of stories submitted by members), with each story viewable in its own page along with a threaded discussion. Each story typically draws a few hundred comments, so to prevent information overload and improve the readability and quality, Slashdot implements a comment moderation system (Lampe & Resnick 2004, Malda 1999). The ever-increasing number of comments complicated this problem. The system went through several evolutions, ultimately producing a distributed moderation system, in keeping with four goals:

The current system potentially allows any registered member to make a limited number of moderations, in keeping with defined eligibility rules. Each time a moderation is made on a comment, it changes the score of the comment by one, with in the range of -1 to 5. Moderations on a member's comments influences that user's karma, Slashdot's measure of reputation. Karma is displayed as "Good" or "Bad" (although the internal measure is actually more complex). Members with positive karma will be able to moderate, and have higher initial scores for any comments they submit.

eBay

eBay, an online auction site, challenges the traditional model of buying and selling. The traditional model, of established shop-fronts, and plazas, requires very little trust on the part of the buyer. The buyer has a vast array of cues as to the reputability and commitment of a dealer, for example, the condition of the shop, and the other patrons in the shop. The buyer can also see the exact item they are purchasing, with no doubt as to its specifications or general quality (damage etc.) (Resnick et al. 2006).

These cues are however not available when buying online. The only cues available are the site you are viewing, and the information the seller publishes about themselves and product, any or all of which may be false. eBay's model introduces a reliable third party to vouch for the seller's reliability, or lack of. eBay's mechanisms promote trust and positive behaviours among its members (Dellarocas 2001)

eBay publishes reputation information for each member. This reputation information is created whenever a buyer and seller complete a transaction. Each participant provides feedback about the other, in the form of a positive/negative/neutral indication, as well as a short textual comment. A members feedback history is made available to all other members, showing textual feedback, as well as a the sum of positive, negative and neutral feedback. (Dellarocas 2002)

digg

digg is a social bookmarking news site. digg's users submit stories to an "upcoming stories" pool. Users may then "digg" an item, effectively adding it to their list of "favourites", which increases the popularity of the item. Alternatively a user may "bury" an item, indicating the story is spam, or of significantly low quality. With enough "diggs" the item will gain high visibility on the home page the most prominently viewed page on the site (digg Inc. 2006).

MacManus (2006c) and Torkington (2006) explain how digg suffers from group-think. As a higher rating (or more popular) story reaches a greater number of readers (possibly putting it on the front page), more will comment on the item, and more will rely on these comments rather than visiting the original source. This is exemplified by the Steve Mallett controversy (Torkington 2006) in January 2006. Mallett was falsely accused by a digg poster of using digg's own web page design for his own sites. The claim was not sufficiently examined by the community and within 3 hours 300 mostly negative comments were posted, despite the article (one click away) clearly was not as negative (MacManus 2006c).

digg has since been extended with features to help solve this problem, by allowing members to tag a story as inaccurate (MacManus 2006b).

reddit

reddit is a lesser-known social bookmarking site, using a similar binary system where a submission may be marked as "hot" or "cold". The higher rating an item receives, the closer to the top of the queue it will move (reddit.com 2006).

Rating articles also has two further effects, it influences the reputability of the poster, and it trains a personal filter. Each "redditor" has their own karma value. This karma value is incremented or decremented by one every time one of their posts is marked as hot or cold respectively, allowing reddit to learn what types of article each user likes and dislikes. This enables, through the use of a personal filter, reddit to provide recommendations to each user. By personalising results, and removing emphasis from a single communal list, reddit hopes to reduce the group-think that digg suffers (MacManus 2006a).

Attention

Attention is an action performed by humans whereby ones' brain is partially or fully focussed on another person, or an informational product of that person. This can include such actions as listening (in person, or a recording), reading, learning, carrying out a request, waiting for or waiting on, or empathising with someone. Goldhaber (2006) sums up attention as 'temporarily (and thereby permanently) allowing another [person] to shape how your mind works'. That is to say, while paying attention, ones' mind is altered to focus on, think like, or think about the target of attention. Memory and learning make permanent this effect, by remembering the action of paying attention, or remembering what was learned while doing so.

Goldhaber (2006) likens the transfer of attention to an economy, where the currency is the limited resource of attention. Varian (1995) describes the "Information economy", where information is distributed and traded electronically. Today however, with the abundance of information, and services such as search engines that allow us to access information effectively, information is no longer a scarce resource upon which to base an economy. Today attention, although it cannot be bought, forms an economy where it has the ability to affect ones' thoughts, actions, and movement of money.

Attention management is becoming an important issue in business today. People today command much more information than ever before, and are exposed to more than we can comprehend. It is becoming increasingly important that our attention be managed to remain productive (Davenport & Berk 2002). Howard Rheingold (1993 cited in Goldhaber 1997a) says 'Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.' Attention leads to action, so to ensure the best actions in business, attention is a major resource that needs to be managed.

Although the amount of attention transferred can not be measured, there are many approximations (Goldhaber 1997b). Steve Gillmore and Seth Goldstein founded AttentionTrust.org to build technologies around attention data, and to raise awareness of the value of attention data (Iskold 2006). AttentionTrust, and the more recent RootMarkets, have together developed software that records a person's online attention data, currently in the limited form of the user's click-stream. This data can be stored locally on the user's computer, or remotely in a secure online attention vault.

Attention vaults have an ever-expanding variety of potential applications. RootMarkets' attention vaults are designed to allow web services to analyse attention data, producing varying forms of personalised data. These applications may include personalised search, recommendations, alerts, news, shopping, and other forms of personalised information filters. Individual technology companies have already started using these forms of filters. Amazon produces personalised recommendations, Google has launched Search History to provide personalised search results, and reddit uses user's ratings to suggest content. Attention vaults have the potential to collect richer data than simple click-streams, and to more successfully mine larger sets of attention data (Iskold 2006).

Conclusion

This chapter followed the evolution of wikis, from its origins as a HyperCard application, to its implementation in the Portland Pattern Repository, to its popularisation through Wikipedia. Through its rapid popularisation, wikis have also accumulated a number of criticisms, against both the principles of wiki systems and the Wikipedia community. Stallman's vision (Stallman 1999) provides important goals and guidelines for the Wikipedia community. Various uses of wikis were identified, apart from their common perception as an encyclopedia. Wikis uses in personal information management and small groups are presented, and various writing styles explored.

The review of literature shows the range of applications and audiences that have used wikis. The typical wiki community was studied, including their thinking styles and values, and the Wikipedia community was explored in detail. It was found that these communities often derive from open-source communities, and are comprised of technical minded people. Continued exploration was made into how wikis, as a technology, fits into the collaborative tools landscape, by comparing and contrasting wikis with other tools. From this, it was found that wikis can compliment or replace a wide range of technologies. In a final survey of wikis, several common wiki systems were analysed.

The chapter entered into a discussion on trust, and how it applies to Wikipedia, both to the perceptions of the Wikipedia community, and of the external view of Wikipedia. Significant criticisms of the lack of authority and reliability were found. Problems with Wikipedia as a globally available resource were identified as Wikipedias' biases were explored. Following on from trust, the concept of reputation was explored. Various existing systems, their mechanisms, and social benefits and consequences were explored. The literature review concluded with an overview of attention, and how it can be employed to generate measures of reputation through personal recommendations.

The chapter explored the literature surrounding Wikipedia, the only widely documented wiki community. Wikipedia is the largest, and best known wiki community, but only one of hundreds or thousands of successful wikis. This prompted several questions:

• How do these smaller wikis behave differently from Wikipedia?
• How do closed (company wikis for example) wikis behave as compared to open wikis?
• How do wikis behave when aiming for a more specific goal as compared to building an "encyclopedia of everything"?
• Does including first hand or subjective data alter the dynamics of wiki communities?

Further questions are raised from the many criticisms of Wikipedia. These criticisms derive from the lack of authoritative analysis and approval of content, which is made difficult by the dynamic nature of content.

• Are there any mechanisms by which the community (or a subset) can provide some level of authority?
• Can a process be developed to allow an authoritative body to validate pages with minimal disruption to the current process?

Bibliography