Analysis of Wikipedia Editing and Social Network Usage in Rural and Urban Areas, Papers of Computer Science

Download Analysis of Wikipedia Editing and Social Network Usage in Rural and Urban Areas and more Papers Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! Dave Alongi (dalongi2) CS 598kgk Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia By: Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl I often find it surprising how good Wikipedia is at damage repair. This paper reinforces that point by showing that, in most cases, there are very few page views of a damaged article before it is repaired. I was rather surprised that 42% of damages are only viewed once – by the editor that is fixing them. It amazes me that there are so many editors dedicated to keeping articles correct. I understand that articles that have a small base of very dedicated editors, for instance areas where they are an expert and doing research. However, I don’t understand how some of the “elite” editors can touch so many different articles, 10’s of thousands, and still claim to be keeping them factual. I also have a personal bias against Wikipedia editors because the one time I was involved in an edit, it was reverted within an hour. And it wasn’t vandalism or misinformation, it was just an additional example that they decided was unneeded. Looking back at that same article now, they have removed all inline examples and changed them to external links. Decisions like this I don’t understand; if they thought all the different types of examples made the article cluttered, why didn’t they move them to a new article specifically for examples? The information isn’t irrelevant or incorrect, yet was deleted anyways. I never made another Wikipedia edit after that happened, even though I have seen simple things like grammatical errors. I think sometimes Wikipedia editors’ arrogance can drive away small time contributors and encourage vandalism. In the paper, there is also a graph of how many times a page is viewed before damage is repaired. The graph seems to be increasing a lot; some articles are viewed many times before repair. I wonder how much this graph is affected by occasional really-bad incidents. For instance, the article cites Stephen Colbert’s attacks on Wikipedia. I would guess that each of those damages is seen by a lot of people just because a lot of people are visiting the page at the exact same time. Other current events may be the same way. For instance, during the [terrible] Super Bowl half time show this year, there were damages made every couple seconds against the artist’s Wikipedia page. With that frequent of vandalism edits, I would guess there were a lot more views. I have the feeling that in articles that are not related to current events, the damaged page views would be lower. Dave Alongi (dalongi2) CS 598kgk A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network By: Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield This paper took a look at how filling out different Facebook profile elements affects the number of friends a user will have. I’m not sure that this is the exact right thing to study, because Facebook is usually used differently than most of the other social networks. It is generally not used to meet new people, but to reaffirm existing relationships and keep in touch. Although I agree that having the high school field filled out probably helps increase friend count, this may have to do with the time that the study was completed. At the time, Facebook was only open to college students. At least at this University, students get their email address during the summer between their senior year of high school and freshman year of college. This means that when they would sign up for Facebook, they would still be hanging out with all their high school friends. However, they would also be facing the inevitable fact that they would soon all be split up. So adding each other as friends on Facebook was a natural step. And people could easily find out which of their friends already had an account by browsing by high school. I liked that the paper wanted to apply common ground theory to Facebook. However, like I said earlier, I don’t think people usually use Facebook to meet other people. In this way, I don’t believe that common ground theory applies. Facebook profiles more reaffirm that your current friends are probably interested in the same things you are, or to help friends who may be connected via school to realize that they also have the same extracurricular interests and enable them to become closer friends. I think that if the authors really want to apply common ground theory, they should look more at group memberships than friendships. Usually, when someone that I don’t know contacts me on Facebook, it is to join a group related to one of my interests. I think this may be more common than just randomly friending people because they have similar interests. Last, I wanted to comment on the researchers’ methods for gathering the data. They said that they ran an automated script to scrape all of the MSU profiles and store it to a database. Last time I checked, Facebook really doesn’t like this. Although they are not exactly the biggest privacy advocates in the world; one thing that they make clear about their API is that you cannot *store* any information except for the person’s Facebook ID, which can be used to link a Facebook account to your website’s account system. I think it would have been nicer if they had found a way to legally and anonymously collect the data.