Collaborative Publishing: Wiki and Wikipedia

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Collaborative Publishing Wiki and Wikipedia

• By Qi Li

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Agenda

• Overview of Wiki and Wikipedia
• Concepts Wiki, Wikipedia, Wiki foundation
• Software and Hardware of Wikis
• Size of Wikipedia
• Knowledge Organization of Wikipedia
• Improving Wikipedias Accurary
• Wikipedia in Natural Language Processing

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Overview of Wiki and Wikipedia

• Reference
• Keshava P Subramanya (keshava_at_cs.ucsb.edu)
• Roopa Kannan (roopakannan_at_cs.ucsb.edu)

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• What is Wiki?
• What is Wikipedia?

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What is Wikipedia?

• Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia
  written by thousands of volunteers in many
  languages
• Free license allows others to freely copy,
  redistribute, and modify our work commercially or
  non-commercially
• Founded January 15, 2001
• wikipedia.org

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What is wikis?

• A wiki is software that allows users to create,
  edit, and link web pages easily.
• Wikis are often used to create collaborative
  websites and to power community websites.
• Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki,
  WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the
  simplest online database that could possibly
  work".

wikipedia.org
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What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

• Non-profit foundation
• Aims to distribute a free encyclopedia to every
  single person on the planet in their own language
• Wikipedia and its sister projects
• Funded by public donations
• http//wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
• Applying for grants
• wikimediafoundation.org

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Wikimedia Projects

• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary
• Wikibooks
• Wikisource
• Wikiquote
• Wikispecies
• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikinews
• .......

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Wikimedia Foundation Governed by Board of
Directors (5 positions 1 permanent (Jimmy
Wales) 2 Bomis reps, 2 community
reps) Foundation coordinates official
(volunteer) positions Fundraising, legal,
technical development, press, etc
MediaWiki (software)
And the projects
Wiktionary Wikinews Wikipedia Wikiversity
Wikiquote Wikisource Commons
Local chapters English (en) German (de)
Italian (it) etc. 215 languages in total
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Advantages of Free License

• Remains non-proprietary
• Decreases individual sense of ownership
• Increases a sense of shared ownership
• Enhances the popularity of Wikipedia
• Attribution requirement extends brand

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Free Software

• MediaWiki is General Public License (GPL)
• all free software on the website
• GNU/Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• Php

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Wikimedias Hardware

• 40 servers
• Squid caching servers in front to serve cached
  objects quickly
• Apache/PHP webservers in the middle
• Database backend (MySql)

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How big is Wikipedia?

• English Wikipedia is largest and has over 130
  million words
• English Wikipedia larger than Britannica and
  Microsoft Encarta combined
• In 15 months the publicly distributed compressed
  database dumps may reach 1 terabyte total size
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaStatistics

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How big is Wikipedia Globally?

• English 533,000 articles
• German 220,000 article
• Japanese 110,000 articles
• French 100,000 articles
• Swedish 71,000 articles
• Nearly 1.5 million across 200 languages
• 20 with gt10,000. 50 with gt1000
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpecialSiteMatrix
• http//Meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Statistics
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaMultilingua
  l_statistics

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How popular is Wikipedia?
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• Knowledge Organizationwith Wikipedia
• Reference
• Jakob Voss Common Library Network (GBV) at 5th
  NKOS Workshop, Alicante September 21, 2006
• Phoebe Ayers UC Davis, Physical Sciences
  Engineering Library, phoebe.ayers _at_ gmail.com
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserPhoebe Ayers

Jakob Voss Knowledge Organization with
Wikipedia. 5th NKOS Workshop, Sep 21,2006
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Scenario 1

• Question
• I know there was an American President named Bush
• Task
• Exact name?
• Other information
• How to search on Wikipedia?
• How to search on Google?

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Scenario 2

• Title Pacific navigators Australia explorers
• Entities
• James Cook (15630)
• La Pérouse (58090)
• Tasman (1988)
• Categories
• explorers (5208)
• Description
• Find the navigators and explorers in the Pacific
  sea in search of Australia
• Narrative
• I am doing an essay on the explorers who
  discovered or charted Australia. I am already
  aware of TASMAN, COOK and La Pérouse and would
  like to get the full list of navigators who
  contributed to the discovery of Australia. Those
  for who there are disputes about their actual
  discovery of (parts of) Australia are still
  acceptable. I am mainly interested by the
  captains of the ships but other people who were
  on board with those navigators still relevant
  (naturalists or others). I am not interested in
  those who came later to settle in Australia.
• Topic From INEX 2007

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Scenario 3

• School of Information Science
• SIS?
• Faulty?
• Ronald L. Larsen
• Peter Brusilovsky
• .
• How to communicate?
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaAbout

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What is Wikipedia namespaces

• Main The main namespace or article namespace is
  the encyclopedia proper. It is the default
  namespace and does not use a prefix.
• Portal (prefix Portal) is for reader-oriented
  portals that help readers find and browse through
  articles related to a specific subject.
• User (prefix User) is a namespace that provides
  pages for Wikipedia users' personal presentations
  and auxiliary pages for personal use, for example
  containing bookmark to favorite pages.
• Image (prefix Image, also called image
  description pages) is a namespace that provides
  info about images and sound clips, one page for
  each, with a link to the image or sound clip
  itself.

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Wikipedia Namespace (cont.)

• Category contains categories of pages, with each
  displaying a list of pages in that category and
  optional additional text.
• Help the basic, technical features of Wikipedia.
• Talk are used to discuss changes to the
  corresponding page in the associated namespace.
  Pages in the user talk namespace are used to
  leave messages for a particular user.
• the talk namespace associated with the main
  article namespace has the prefix Talk,
• while the talk namespace associated with the user
  namespace has the prefix User talk

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Wikipedia Namespace (cont.)

• MediaWiki (prefix MediaWiki) is a namespace
  containing interface texts such as link labels
  and messages. They are used for adjusting the
  localisation (i.e. local version) of interface
  messages without waiting for a new LanguageXx.php
  file to get installed.
• Template (formerly part of the MediaWiki
  namespace) is used to define a standard text
  which can then be conveniently added within
  pages, either the text itself at the time of
  adding, or a reference to the text at the time of
  viewing the page. The latter way effectively
  changes all such occurrences of the standard text
  automatically by just editing the page where the
  text is defined. .
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaNamespace

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How do articles get written?

• Someone starts it
• Someone else checks it
• A (possibly third) party edits it
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HelpContents/Editing
  _Wikipedia

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Article Criteria

• Notable (encyclopedic)
• Not vanity
• Not duplication
• Community consensus

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http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaHow_to_edit
_a_page
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Edit wars and other things that go boom
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Predictable vandalism posted and reverted the
same minute (1031)
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What is Collaborative Publishing?

• Collaborative works are created by multiple
  people together rather than individually
• Publishing knowledge
• Some projects are overseen by an editor or
  editorial team
• Many grow without any top-down oversight

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Characteristics 1 access control

• All users to edit any page but with control
  access
• Control Access
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaEditorial_o
  versight_and_controlTypes_of_access

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Characteristics 2 Revision control
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaEditorial_o
versight_and_controlTypes_of_access
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Wikipedias Accuracy
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Criticisms

• Could a collaborative project that anyone can
  edit be a public good?
• Contribute articles
• Quality of articles is close to Encyclopaedia
  Britannica
• Vandalism
• Creeping bureaucracy growing instances of
  infighting among editors
• The communitys anti-intellectual attitude
• digital Maoism
• faith-based encyclopaedia
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaAbout

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Further criticisms

• Entries for pop cultural figures vs. those for
  great literary figures, scientists, etc.
• Entry for Britney Spears longer than entry for
  St. Augustine
• Seinfeld longer than Shakespeare Barbie longer
  than Bellow
• Response Nothing to get exercised about

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80/10 Rule

• Counting only logged in users, and even excluding
  some prominent approved bot users
• 10 percent of all users make 80 of all edits
• 5 percent of all users make 66 of edits
• Half of all edits are made by just 2 1/2 percent
  of all users

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Edits by Anons

• Controversial, intruiging
• Yes, you can edit this page
• Without logging in!

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Edits by Anons -

• Anonymous ip numbers can edit Wikipedia, and do
• But these edits make up a total of around 18 of
  all edits, with some evidence of a downward trend
  over time
• Anecdotally, many regular users report sometimes
  editing anonymously by accident or as a quiet
  form of Sock Puppeting

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Edits across namespaces

• Articles 85
• Talk pages 8
• User Page 3
• User Talk Pages 4
• These percentages are stable in 2003
• And 2004

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Studying the Accuracy of Wikipedia

• Study by Nature
• factual errors, omissions or misleading
  statements Wikipedia vs Britannica 162 vs 123
  major 4 vs 4
• Survey whether they think sample articles are
  accurate
• 76 -- accurate

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Separate the wheat from the chaff

• Proposal 1 Based on explicit article validation
• trusted user (defined using various criteria)
  explicitly marks an article as good
• Peer-based explicit system allow users to choose
  which of their peers to trust, thus providing
  different results for each user
• Shortage explicit input from reviews

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• Proposal 2 automatically assess information
  quality by calculating metrics based on metadata
  recorded and stored by Wikipedia
• Metrics of edits made for the article and of
  unique editors for the article
• Distinguish of two classes of pages
• Link ratio analysis
• Quality of editors
• Trustworthiness or reputation of authors and
  articles
• Segments instead of articles

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• Surprisingly successful
• Large/Complete/Coverage
• Again Free

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References

• Cohen, Noam. Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but
  Selectively. The New York Times January 29
  (2007) Section C, page 3.
• Economist. Battle of Britannica. Economist
  378.8471 (April 1, 2006) 65-66.
• Fallis, Don. The Epistemic Benefits and Costs
  and Collaboration. Southern Journal of
  Philosophy 44.S (2006) 197-208.
• Fallis, Don. On Verifying the Accuracy of
  Information Philosophical Perspectives. Library
  Trends 52.3 (2004) 463-487.
• Fricke, Martin and Don Fallis. Indicators of
  Accuracy of Consumer Health Information on the
  Internet. Journal of the American Medical
  Informatics Association 9 (2002) 73-79.
• Giles, J. Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to
  Head. Nature 438.7069 (December 15, 2005)
  900-901.
• Hettinger, Edwin. Justifying Intellectual
  Property. Philosophy and Public Affairs 18
  (1989) 31-52.
• Paine, Lynn Sharp. Trade Secrets and the
  Justification of Intellectual Property A Comment
  on Hettinger. Philosophy and Public Affairs 20
  (1991) 247-263.
• Poe, Marshall. The Hive. Atlantic Monthly 298.2
  (September 2006) 86-94.
• Resnik, David. A Pluralistic Account of
  Intellectual Property. Journal of Business
  Ethics 46 (2003) 319-335.
• Schiff, Stacy. Know it All. New Yorker 82.23
  (July 31, 2006).
• Sunstein, Cass. Mobbed up. New Republic 230.24
  (June 28, 2004) 40-45.
• Surowieki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York
  Anchor Books, 2004.

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Wikipedia in NLP

• Ontology
• Thesauri
• Categorization
• Topic Detection
• Information Retrieval (Query Expansion)
• Word Sense Disambiguation
• Question Answer
• Translation (CLIR)

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Wikitology !

• Using Wikipedia as an ontology offers the best of
  both approaches
• Each article is a concept in the ontology
• Terms linked via Wikipedias category system and
  inter-article links
• Its a consensus ontology created, kept current
  and maintained by a diverse community
• Overall content quality is high

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Wikitology features

• Terms have unique IDs (URLs) and are self
  describing for people
• Several underlying graphs provide structure
  categories, article links
• Article history contains useful meta-data (e.g.,
  for trust)
• External sources provide more info (e.g.,
  Googles pagerank)
• Some of the data available in structured form,
  e.g., in RDF from DBpedia

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Semantic Wikipedia
Völkel et al (2006) Semantic Wikipedia. WWW2006
conference

• Typed links is capital ofEnglandgt RDF
  triples

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Thesauri

• Reference
• Mining Domain-Specific Thesauri from Wikipedia A
  case study, Milne, D., Medelyan, O., and Witten,
  H. 2006. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM
  International Conference on Web Intelligence
• Milne, D., Witten, I. H., Nichols, D. M.
  (2007). Extracting corpus specific knowledge
  bases from Wikipedia. CIKM. Lisbon, Portugal.

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Thesauri

• Thesauri
• an indexed compilation of words with similar,
  related, broader, narrower and opposite meanings.
• Wikipedia
• Each article - a concept
• Hyperlinks - relations
• Equivalence - USE, USE FOR
• Hierarchical - BT, NT
• Associative - RT

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Topic Detection

• Reference
• Identifying document topics using the Wikipedia
  category network, Peter Schonhofen, Proceedings
  of the 2006 IEEE/ACM International Conference on
  Web Intelligence (WI 2006 Main Conference
  Proceedings)

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• Topic Detection
• To detect concepts in the document
• select the most dominant concepts to present the
  document.
• Ontology from wikipedia
• Coverage of wikipedia is general purpose and very
  wide,
• Structure is rich and consistent

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Wikipedia structure

• Components articles, images pages, discussion
  about article contents, authors, page component
  templates and so on.
• Articles titles, categories, refer to other
  articles
• Categories hierarchically into sub- and
  super-categories (not just tree)
• Author links between articles, hierarchy of
  categories.

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Wikipedia structure
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Wikipedia for classification

• Reference
• Overcoming the Brittleness Bottleneck using
  Wikipedia Enhancing Text Categorization with
  Encyclopedic Knowledge. Engeniy Gabrilovich and
  Shaul Markovitch American Association for
  Artificial Intelligence 2006
• Benerjee, S., Ramanthan, K., Gupta, A. (2007),
  Clustering short text using Wikipedia, SIGIR
• Meyer, M., Rensing, C. (2007). Categorizing
  Learning Objects based on Wikiepdia as Substitue
  Corpus. Proceedings of the First International
  Workshop on Learning Object Discovery and
  Exchange.

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Text Classification

• Deals with automatic assignment of category
  labels to natural language documents
• Represent document as bags of words
• Features from words
• Limitation of BOW
• by individual word occurrences in the training
  set
• Wal-Mart supply chain goes real time
• Wal-Mart manages its stock with RFID technology
• Effective in medium difficulty categorization,
  but bad in small categories or short documents
• Using encyclopedia to endow the machine document
  with the broader of knowledge available to humans

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• Auxiliary text classifier
• matching documents with the most relevant
  articles of wikipedia
• conventional bag of words new features
• Examples for idea of auxiliary text classifier
• Bernanke takes charge
• BEN BERNANKE, FEDERAL RESERVE, CHAIRMAN OF THE
  FEDERAL RESERVE, ALAN GREENSPAN, MONETARISM,
• Using wikipedia
• Use text similarity algorithms to automatically
  identify encyclopedia articles relevant to each
  document
• Leverage the knowledge gained from these articles

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Word Sense Disambiguation

• Some names denote multiple entities
• John Williams and the Boston Pops conducted a
  summer Star Wars concert at Tanglewood.
• John Williams ? John Williams (composer)
• John Williams lost a Taipei death match against
  his brother, Axl Rotten.
• John Williams ? John Williams (wrestler)
• John Williams won a Victoria Cross for his
  actions at the battle of Rorkes Drift.
• John Williams ? John Williams (VC)

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• Some entities have multiple names
• John Williams (composer) ? John Williams
• John Williams (composer) ? John Towner Williams
• John Williams (wrestler) ? John Williams
• John Williams (wrestler) ? Ian Rotten
• Venus (planet) ? Venus
• Venus (planet) ? Morning Star
• Venus (planet) ? Evening Star

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WSD

• Web searches
• Queries about Named Entities (NEs) constitute a
  significant portion of popular web queries.
• Ideally, search results are clustered such that
• In each cluster, the queried name denotes the
  same entity.
• Each cluster is enriched by querying the web with
  alternative names of the corresponding entity.
• Web-based Information Extraction (IE)
• Aggregating extractions from multiple web pages
  can lead to improved accuracy in IE tasks (e.g.
  extracting relationships between NEs).
• Named entity disambiguation is essential for
  performing a meaningful aggregation.

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Wikipedia Structures

• In general, there is a many-to-many relationship
  between names and entities, captured in Wikipedia
  through
• Redirect articles.
• Disambiguation articles.
• Hyperlinks An article may contain links to other
  articles in Wikipedia.
• Categories each article belongs to at least one
  Wikipedia category.

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Redirect Articles

• Redirect article
• exists for each alternative name used to refer to
  an entity in Wikipedia.
• Example The article titled John Towner Williams
  consists in a pointer to the article John
  Williams (composer).
• Disambiguation article
• lists all Wikipedia entities (articles) that may
  be denoted by an ambiguous name.
• Example The article titled John Williams
  (disambiguation) list 22 entities (articles).

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Conclusion

• Overview of Wikipedia
• Knowledge organization in Wikipedia
• Accuracy of Wikipedia
• Application of Wikipedia in NLP