The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through c... more The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through collaborative efforts from all over the globe. Despite the project's goal being to achieve the sum of human knowledge, there are strong content imbalances across the language editions. In order to quantify and investigate these imbalances, we study the impact of cultural context in 40 language editions. To this purpose, we developed a computational method to identify articles that can be related to the editors' cultural context associated to each Wikipedia language edition. We employed a combination of strategies taking into account geolocated articles, specific keywords and categories, as well as links between articles. We verified the method's quality with manual assessment and found an average precision of 0.92 and an average recall of 0.95. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural context. Although a considerable part of this content was created during the first years of the project, its creation is sustained over time. An analysis of cross-language coverage of this content shows that most of it is unique in its original language, and reveals special links between cultural contexts; at the same time, it highlights gaps where the encyclopedia could extend its content. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The datasets produced are made available for further research.
The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges reg... more The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges regarding interfaces to enable citizens to make sense of urban data for improving their daily life and for fostering online participation. The existing dashboards include only pre-defined and limited use cases which can only address the most common needs of citizens, but do not allow for personalization. As consequence, the great effort of cities to make data widely available has still scarce capacity to get an impact for the public good. In this work, we propose an open source dashboard with a set of tools and services to enable citizens to easily explore city-related data and create interactive visualizations. Moreover, users can personalize the dashboard based on their individual, local, task-specific goals and interests, and share the resulting dashboard to promote co-creation. In this way, citizens can build up a data-driven public awareness, supporting an open, transparent, and collaborative city where they are actively involved in local activities and campaigns.
Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting w... more Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial properties. We analyze data from a large-scale online social network, Tuenti, with about 10 million active users: our sample includes user profiles, user home locations and online social interactions among Tuenti members. Our findings support the idea that spatial distance constraints whom users interact with, but not the intensity of their social interactions. Furthermore, friendship ties belonging to denser connected groups tend to arise at shorter spatial distances than social ties established between members belonging to different groups. Finally, we show that our findings mostly do not depend on the age of the users, although younger users seem to be slightly more constrained to shorter geographic distances. Augmenting social structure with geographic information adds a new dimension to social network analysis and a large number of theoretical investigations and practical applications can be pursued for online social systems, with 2 David Laniado et al. many promising outcomes. As the amount of available location-based data is increasing, our findings and results open the door to future possibilities: researchers would benefit from these insights when studying online social services , while developers should be aware of these additional possibilities when building systems and applications related to online social platforms.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize d... more The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information, as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of an active engagement with cultural heritage. We have developed the open source and freely available analysis architecture Contropedia to examine already existing volunteer user-generated participation around cultural heritage and to promote further engagement with it. Conceptually, we employ the notion of memory work, as it helps to treat Wikipedia's articles, edit histories, and discussion pages as a rich resource to study how cultural heritage is received and (re)worked in and across languages and cultures. Contropedia's architecture allows for the study of the negotiations around and appreciation of cultural heritage without assuming an unchallenged and universal understanding of cultural heritage. The analysis facilitated by Contropedia thus sheds light on the contentious articulation of perspectives on tangible and intangible heritage grounded by conflicting conceptions of events, ideas, places, or persons. Technologically, Contropedia combines techniques based on mining article edit histories and analyzing discussion patterns in talk pages to identify and visualize heritage-related disputes within an article, and to compare these across language versions. In terms of digital heritage, Contropedia presents a powerful tool that opens up a core resource to cultural heritage studies. Moreover, it can form part of a conceptually grounded, technically advanced, and practically enrolled infrastructure for public education that opens up the dynamic formation of both knowledge about cultural heritage and new forms of digital cultural heritage that show a considerable amount of friction.
Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been... more Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such phenomenon by analyzing the interactions of the ∼10 million users of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking service popular among teenagers. In dyadic relationships we find evidence of higher gender homophily for women. We also observe a preference of users with more friends to connect to the opposite gender. A particularly marked gender difference emerges in signing up for the social networking service and adding the first friends, and in the interactions by means of wall messages. In these contexts we find evidence of a strong homophily for women, and little or no homophily for men. By examining the gender composition of triangle motifs, we observe a marked tendency of users to group into gender homogeneous clusters, with a particularly high number of male-only triangles. We show that age plays an important role in this context, with a tendency to higher homophily for young teenagers in both dyadic and triadic relationships. Our findings have implications for addressing gender gap issues, understanding adolescent online behavior and technology adoption, and modeling social networks.
Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differ... more Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management (SRM) or carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric SRM rather than land-based CDR type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for SRM type technologies more than for land-based CDR ones. The paper also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualizing tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the paper contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a Highlights The geoengineering notion tends to be associated with atmospheric SRM technologies Heterogeneous and contextual analysis makes commercial and military interests visible More controversial geoengineering technologies gain most from dominant definition Wikipedia data can be used to open up dominating definitions and classifications
Social media has become a key mechanism for the organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015... more Social media has become a key mechanism for the organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015 Barcelona City Council election, Barcelona en Comú, an emerging grassroots party, was the most voted one. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement is based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postulates that parties historically develop oligarchical leadership structures. This tension motivates us to examine whether Barcelona en Comú preserved a decentralized structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization. In this article we propose a computational framework to analyze the Twitter networks of the parties that ran for this election by measuring their hierarchical structure, small-world phenomenon and coreness. The results of our assessment show that in Barcelona en Comú two well-defined groups co-exist: a cluster dominated by the party leader and the collective accounts, and another cluster formed by the movement activists. While the former group is highly centralized like traditional parties, the latter one stands out for its decentralized, cohesive and resilient structure.
CHI'15: 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings, Apr 2015
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead ... more Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
Background:
Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the mak... more Background:
Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production.
Methods:
We investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength.
Principal Findings:
We find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another).
Conclusions/Significance:
Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring... more In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media.
Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.
Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.
In this paper we study identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congr... more In this paper we study identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congruently with their cultural identity values by contributing with content related to them. To assess its influence, we developed a computational method to identify articles related to the cultural identities associated to a language and applied it to 40 Wikipedia language editions. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural identities. The topical coverage of these articles reflects that geography, biographies, and culture are the most common themes, although each language shows its idiosyncrasy and other topics are also present. The majority of these articles remain exclusive to each language, which is consistent with the idea that a Cultural Identity is defined in relation to others; as entangled and separated. An analysis of how this content is shared among language editions reveals special links between cultures. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The datasets produced in this study are made available for further research.
We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a... more We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of " Gamergate Controversy " , an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We show how our tools can be used to visually explore editor disagreement interactions and networks, as well as conflicted content and provenance, and present some of the results. We argue that these individual tools could benefit from synergies by combining them and lay out a possible architecture for doing so.
When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version ... more When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of emotions in conversations among Wikipedia editors. ... more This paper presents a large-scale analysis of emotions in conversations among Wikipedia editors. Our focus is on the emotions expressed by editors in talk pages, measured by using the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW).
We find evidence that to a large extent women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone, and that administrators are more positive than non\hyph administrators. Surprisingly, female non-administrators tend to behave like administrators in many aspects.
We observe that replies are on average more positive than the comments they reply to, preventing many discussions from spiralling down into conflict. We also find evidence of emotional homophily: editors having similar emotional styles are more likely to interact with each other.
Our findings offer novel insights into the emotional dimension of interactions in peer-production communities, and contribute to debates on issues such as the flattening of editor growth and the gender gap.
Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In... more Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversations. An analysis of the tree structure of the article talk pages allows to capture patterns of interaction, and reveals structural differences among the discussions about articles from different semantic areas.
Yana Volkovich, David Laniado, Karolin Kappler and Andreas Kaltenbrunner (2014). Gender patterns in a large online social network. SocInfo '14 - The 6th International Conference on Social Informatics, Barcelona, Spain, November 2014 , Nov 2014
Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various ... more Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various contexts. This study investigates such differences in the case of online social networking. We find a general tendency towards gender homophily, more marked for women, however users having a large circle of friends tend to have more connections with users of the opposite gender. We also inspect the temporal sequences of adding new friends and find that females are much more likely to connect with other females as their initial friends. Through studying triangle motifs broken down by gender we detect a marked tendency of users to gender segregation, i.e. to form single gender groups; this phenomenon is more accentuated for male users.
Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared inte... more Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared interest between users, but merely provide a public display of personal identity. A better picture of online social behaviour can be achieved by taking into account the intensity of communication levels between users, yielding useful insights for service providers supporting this communication. Among the several factors impacting user interactions, geographic distance might be affecting how users communicate with their friends. While spatial proximity appears influencing how people connect to each other even on the Web, the relationship between social interaction and spatial distance remains unexplored.
In this work we analyse the relationship between online user interactions and geographic proximity with a detailed study of a large Spanish online social service. Our results show that while geographic distance strongly affects how social links are created, spatial proximity plays a negligible role on user interactions. These findings offer new insights on the interplay between social and spatial factors influencing online user behaviour and open new directions for future research and applications.
"The popularity of theWeb has allowed individuals to communicate and interact with each other on ... more "The popularity of theWeb has allowed individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a global scale: people connect both to close friends and acquaintances, creating ties that can bridge otherwise separated groups of people. Recent evidence suggests that spatial distance is still affecting social links established on online platforms, with online ties preferentially connecting closer people.
In this work we study the relationships between interaction strength, spatial distance and structural position of ties between members of a large-scale online social networking platform, Tuenti. We discover that ties in highly connected social groups tend to span shorter distances than connections bridging together otherwise separated portions of the network. We also find that such bridging connections have lower social interaction levels than ties within the inner core of the network and ties connecting to its periphery. Our results suggest that spatial constraints on online social networks are intimately connected to structural network properties, with important consequences for information diffusion."
Definitions and classifications of geoengineering are fluid and contested. Wikipedia offers an op... more Definitions and classifications of geoengineering are fluid and contested. Wikipedia offers an opportunity to study how people negotiate and construct these definitions. Geoengineering related Wikipedia articles were identified in an overall dataset of climate change related articles, with data on both article inter-linkage and the commenting activity of article editors. This enabled analysis of how geoengineering is constructed on Wikipedia, in itself and in relation to wider climate change discourse.
The main finding is that a distinction is made on Wikipedia between two groups of geoengineering methods. On the one hand, there is a group of land-based sequestration technologies, strongly related to adaptation and mitigation discourse, and on the other hand a set of geoengineering technologies, including solar radiation management, ocean iron fertilisation, weather modification and planetary engineering, that is relatively separate from the overall climate change discourse on Wikipedia.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through c... more The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through collaborative efforts from all over the globe. Despite the project's goal being to achieve the sum of human knowledge, there are strong content imbalances across the language editions. In order to quantify and investigate these imbalances, we study the impact of cultural context in 40 language editions. To this purpose, we developed a computational method to identify articles that can be related to the editors' cultural context associated to each Wikipedia language edition. We employed a combination of strategies taking into account geolocated articles, specific keywords and categories, as well as links between articles. We verified the method's quality with manual assessment and found an average precision of 0.92 and an average recall of 0.95. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural context. Although a considerable part of this content was created during the first years of the project, its creation is sustained over time. An analysis of cross-language coverage of this content shows that most of it is unique in its original language, and reveals special links between cultural contexts; at the same time, it highlights gaps where the encyclopedia could extend its content. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The datasets produced are made available for further research.
The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges reg... more The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges regarding interfaces to enable citizens to make sense of urban data for improving their daily life and for fostering online participation. The existing dashboards include only pre-defined and limited use cases which can only address the most common needs of citizens, but do not allow for personalization. As consequence, the great effort of cities to make data widely available has still scarce capacity to get an impact for the public good. In this work, we propose an open source dashboard with a set of tools and services to enable citizens to easily explore city-related data and create interactive visualizations. Moreover, users can personalize the dashboard based on their individual, local, task-specific goals and interests, and share the resulting dashboard to promote co-creation. In this way, citizens can build up a data-driven public awareness, supporting an open, transparent, and collaborative city where they are actively involved in local activities and campaigns.
Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting w... more Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial properties. We analyze data from a large-scale online social network, Tuenti, with about 10 million active users: our sample includes user profiles, user home locations and online social interactions among Tuenti members. Our findings support the idea that spatial distance constraints whom users interact with, but not the intensity of their social interactions. Furthermore, friendship ties belonging to denser connected groups tend to arise at shorter spatial distances than social ties established between members belonging to different groups. Finally, we show that our findings mostly do not depend on the age of the users, although younger users seem to be slightly more constrained to shorter geographic distances. Augmenting social structure with geographic information adds a new dimension to social network analysis and a large number of theoretical investigations and practical applications can be pursued for online social systems, with 2 David Laniado et al. many promising outcomes. As the amount of available location-based data is increasing, our findings and results open the door to future possibilities: researchers would benefit from these insights when studying online social services , while developers should be aware of these additional possibilities when building systems and applications related to online social platforms.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize d... more The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information, as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of an active engagement with cultural heritage. We have developed the open source and freely available analysis architecture Contropedia to examine already existing volunteer user-generated participation around cultural heritage and to promote further engagement with it. Conceptually, we employ the notion of memory work, as it helps to treat Wikipedia's articles, edit histories, and discussion pages as a rich resource to study how cultural heritage is received and (re)worked in and across languages and cultures. Contropedia's architecture allows for the study of the negotiations around and appreciation of cultural heritage without assuming an unchallenged and universal understanding of cultural heritage. The analysis facilitated by Contropedia thus sheds light on the contentious articulation of perspectives on tangible and intangible heritage grounded by conflicting conceptions of events, ideas, places, or persons. Technologically, Contropedia combines techniques based on mining article edit histories and analyzing discussion patterns in talk pages to identify and visualize heritage-related disputes within an article, and to compare these across language versions. In terms of digital heritage, Contropedia presents a powerful tool that opens up a core resource to cultural heritage studies. Moreover, it can form part of a conceptually grounded, technically advanced, and practically enrolled infrastructure for public education that opens up the dynamic formation of both knowledge about cultural heritage and new forms of digital cultural heritage that show a considerable amount of friction.
Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been... more Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such phenomenon by analyzing the interactions of the ∼10 million users of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking service popular among teenagers. In dyadic relationships we find evidence of higher gender homophily for women. We also observe a preference of users with more friends to connect to the opposite gender. A particularly marked gender difference emerges in signing up for the social networking service and adding the first friends, and in the interactions by means of wall messages. In these contexts we find evidence of a strong homophily for women, and little or no homophily for men. By examining the gender composition of triangle motifs, we observe a marked tendency of users to group into gender homogeneous clusters, with a particularly high number of male-only triangles. We show that age plays an important role in this context, with a tendency to higher homophily for young teenagers in both dyadic and triadic relationships. Our findings have implications for addressing gender gap issues, understanding adolescent online behavior and technology adoption, and modeling social networks.
Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differ... more Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management (SRM) or carbon dioxide removal (CDR). We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric SRM rather than land-based CDR type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for SRM type technologies more than for land-based CDR ones. The paper also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualizing tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the paper contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a Highlights The geoengineering notion tends to be associated with atmospheric SRM technologies Heterogeneous and contextual analysis makes commercial and military interests visible More controversial geoengineering technologies gain most from dominant definition Wikipedia data can be used to open up dominating definitions and classifications
Social media has become a key mechanism for the organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015... more Social media has become a key mechanism for the organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015 Barcelona City Council election, Barcelona en Comú, an emerging grassroots party, was the most voted one. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement is based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postulates that parties historically develop oligarchical leadership structures. This tension motivates us to examine whether Barcelona en Comú preserved a decentralized structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization. In this article we propose a computational framework to analyze the Twitter networks of the parties that ran for this election by measuring their hierarchical structure, small-world phenomenon and coreness. The results of our assessment show that in Barcelona en Comú two well-defined groups co-exist: a cluster dominated by the party leader and the collective accounts, and another cluster formed by the movement activists. While the former group is highly centralized like traditional parties, the latter one stands out for its decentralized, cohesive and resilient structure.
CHI'15: 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings, Apr 2015
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead ... more Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
Background:
Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the mak... more Background:
Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production.
Methods:
We investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength.
Principal Findings:
We find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another).
Conclusions/Significance:
Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring... more In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media.
Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.
Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.
In this paper we study identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congr... more In this paper we study identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congruently with their cultural identity values by contributing with content related to them. To assess its influence, we developed a computational method to identify articles related to the cultural identities associated to a language and applied it to 40 Wikipedia language editions. The results show that about a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to represent the corresponding cultural identities. The topical coverage of these articles reflects that geography, biographies, and culture are the most common themes, although each language shows its idiosyncrasy and other topics are also present. The majority of these articles remain exclusive to each language, which is consistent with the idea that a Cultural Identity is defined in relation to others; as entangled and separated. An analysis of how this content is shared among language editions reveals special links between cultures. The approach and findings presented in this study can help to foster participation and inter-cultural enrichment of Wikipedias. The datasets produced in this study are made available for further research.
We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a... more We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of " Gamergate Controversy " , an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We show how our tools can be used to visually explore editor disagreement interactions and networks, as well as conflicted content and provenance, and present some of the results. We argue that these individual tools could benefit from synergies by combining them and lay out a possible architecture for doing so.
When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version ... more When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of emotions in conversations among Wikipedia editors. ... more This paper presents a large-scale analysis of emotions in conversations among Wikipedia editors. Our focus is on the emotions expressed by editors in talk pages, measured by using the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW).
We find evidence that to a large extent women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone, and that administrators are more positive than non\hyph administrators. Surprisingly, female non-administrators tend to behave like administrators in many aspects.
We observe that replies are on average more positive than the comments they reply to, preventing many discussions from spiralling down into conflict. We also find evidence of emotional homophily: editors having similar emotional styles are more likely to interact with each other.
Our findings offer novel insights into the emotional dimension of interactions in peer-production communities, and contribute to debates on issues such as the flattening of editor growth and the gender gap.
Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In... more Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversations. An analysis of the tree structure of the article talk pages allows to capture patterns of interaction, and reveals structural differences among the discussions about articles from different semantic areas.
Yana Volkovich, David Laniado, Karolin Kappler and Andreas Kaltenbrunner (2014). Gender patterns in a large online social network. SocInfo '14 - The 6th International Conference on Social Informatics, Barcelona, Spain, November 2014 , Nov 2014
Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various ... more Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various contexts. This study investigates such differences in the case of online social networking. We find a general tendency towards gender homophily, more marked for women, however users having a large circle of friends tend to have more connections with users of the opposite gender. We also inspect the temporal sequences of adding new friends and find that females are much more likely to connect with other females as their initial friends. Through studying triangle motifs broken down by gender we detect a marked tendency of users to gender segregation, i.e. to form single gender groups; this phenomenon is more accentuated for male users.
Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared inte... more Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared interest between users, but merely provide a public display of personal identity. A better picture of online social behaviour can be achieved by taking into account the intensity of communication levels between users, yielding useful insights for service providers supporting this communication. Among the several factors impacting user interactions, geographic distance might be affecting how users communicate with their friends. While spatial proximity appears influencing how people connect to each other even on the Web, the relationship between social interaction and spatial distance remains unexplored.
In this work we analyse the relationship between online user interactions and geographic proximity with a detailed study of a large Spanish online social service. Our results show that while geographic distance strongly affects how social links are created, spatial proximity plays a negligible role on user interactions. These findings offer new insights on the interplay between social and spatial factors influencing online user behaviour and open new directions for future research and applications.
"The popularity of theWeb has allowed individuals to communicate and interact with each other on ... more "The popularity of theWeb has allowed individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a global scale: people connect both to close friends and acquaintances, creating ties that can bridge otherwise separated groups of people. Recent evidence suggests that spatial distance is still affecting social links established on online platforms, with online ties preferentially connecting closer people.
In this work we study the relationships between interaction strength, spatial distance and structural position of ties between members of a large-scale online social networking platform, Tuenti. We discover that ties in highly connected social groups tend to span shorter distances than connections bridging together otherwise separated portions of the network. We also find that such bridging connections have lower social interaction levels than ties within the inner core of the network and ties connecting to its periphery. Our results suggest that spatial constraints on online social networks are intimately connected to structural network properties, with important consequences for information diffusion."
Definitions and classifications of geoengineering are fluid and contested. Wikipedia offers an op... more Definitions and classifications of geoengineering are fluid and contested. Wikipedia offers an opportunity to study how people negotiate and construct these definitions. Geoengineering related Wikipedia articles were identified in an overall dataset of climate change related articles, with data on both article inter-linkage and the commenting activity of article editors. This enabled analysis of how geoengineering is constructed on Wikipedia, in itself and in relation to wider climate change discourse.
The main finding is that a distinction is made on Wikipedia between two groups of geoengineering methods. On the one hand, there is a group of land-based sequestration technologies, strongly related to adaptation and mitigation discourse, and on the other hand a set of geoengineering technologies, including solar radiation management, ocean iron fertilisation, weather modification and planetary engineering, that is relatively separate from the overall climate change discourse on Wikipedia.
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Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production.
Methods:
We investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength.
Principal Findings:
We find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another).
Conclusions/Significance:
Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.
Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.
We find evidence that to a large extent women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone, and that administrators are more positive than non\hyph administrators. Surprisingly, female non-administrators tend to behave like administrators in many aspects.
We observe that replies are on average more positive than the comments they reply to, preventing many discussions from spiralling down into conflict. We also find evidence of emotional homophily: editors having similar emotional styles are more likely to interact with each other.
Our findings offer novel insights into the emotional dimension of interactions in peer-production communities, and contribute to debates on issues such as the flattening of editor growth and the gender gap.
In this work we analyse the relationship between online user interactions and geographic proximity with a detailed study of a large Spanish online social service. Our results show that while geographic distance strongly affects how social links are created, spatial proximity plays a negligible role on user interactions. These findings offer new insights on the interplay between social and spatial factors influencing online user behaviour and open new directions for future research and applications.
In this work we study the relationships between interaction strength, spatial distance and structural position of ties between members of a large-scale online social networking platform, Tuenti. We discover that ties in highly connected social groups tend to span shorter distances than connections bridging together otherwise separated portions of the network. We also find that such bridging connections have lower social interaction levels than ties within the inner core of the network and ties connecting to its periphery. Our results suggest that spatial constraints on online social networks are intimately connected to structural network properties, with important consequences for information diffusion."
The main finding is that a distinction is made on Wikipedia between two groups of geoengineering methods. On the one hand, there is a group of land-based sequestration technologies, strongly related to adaptation and mitigation discourse, and on the other hand a set of geoengineering technologies, including solar radiation management, ocean iron fertilisation, weather modification and planetary engineering, that is relatively separate from the overall climate change discourse on Wikipedia.
Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production.
Methods:
We investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength.
Principal Findings:
We find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another).
Conclusions/Significance:
Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.
Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.
We find evidence that to a large extent women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone, and that administrators are more positive than non\hyph administrators. Surprisingly, female non-administrators tend to behave like administrators in many aspects.
We observe that replies are on average more positive than the comments they reply to, preventing many discussions from spiralling down into conflict. We also find evidence of emotional homophily: editors having similar emotional styles are more likely to interact with each other.
Our findings offer novel insights into the emotional dimension of interactions in peer-production communities, and contribute to debates on issues such as the flattening of editor growth and the gender gap.
In this work we analyse the relationship between online user interactions and geographic proximity with a detailed study of a large Spanish online social service. Our results show that while geographic distance strongly affects how social links are created, spatial proximity plays a negligible role on user interactions. These findings offer new insights on the interplay between social and spatial factors influencing online user behaviour and open new directions for future research and applications.
In this work we study the relationships between interaction strength, spatial distance and structural position of ties between members of a large-scale online social networking platform, Tuenti. We discover that ties in highly connected social groups tend to span shorter distances than connections bridging together otherwise separated portions of the network. We also find that such bridging connections have lower social interaction levels than ties within the inner core of the network and ties connecting to its periphery. Our results suggest that spatial constraints on online social networks are intimately connected to structural network properties, with important consequences for information diffusion."
The main finding is that a distinction is made on Wikipedia between two groups of geoengineering methods. On the one hand, there is a group of land-based sequestration technologies, strongly related to adaptation and mitigation discourse, and on the other hand a set of geoengineering technologies, including solar radiation management, ocean iron fertilisation, weather modification and planetary engineering, that is relatively separate from the overall climate change discourse on Wikipedia.