iConference 2011 Wiki roles paper awarded best paper – University of Washington, Seattle, WA

http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/

Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia, about the variety of roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers. The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees.

The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, Austin Lin at Cornell University and Microsoft, Dan Cosley, Fedor Dokshin, Gueorgi Kossinets and Geri Gay at Cornell University, and Marc Smith from Connected Action.

The paper pdf pre-print is available here: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~welser/Welser.Cosley.plus.Wiki.Roles.pdf

The link to the ACM abstract and pdf: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778&CFID=9933318&CFTOKEN=58981138

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential “structural signatures” that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month’s cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

3 thoughts on “iConference 2011 Wiki roles paper awarded best paper – University of Washington, Seattle, WA”

Do you have a characterization of participating sociologists who, like Danah Boyd, Sherry Turkle, Brené Brown, Jane McGonigal, Howard Gardner, Simon Baron-Cohen, Umberto Eco, and Victor Turner, investigate, analyze, deconstruct, re-synthesize, and narrate the emerging stories of WikiCulture from the inside out?

I am familiar with the work and methods of ethnographic social science, but my focus is on a more quantitative, objective, and social network analysis driven approach.
Some resources you may want to consider for enthographic resources include the AIR-L email list, the AnthroDesign email list, and the CITASA email list.

Regards, Marc