WikiSym 2010 is the 6th edition of the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. It will take place in the beautiful Polish city of Gdansk, on July 7-9. It will be a great way to spend some days in the beginning of summer getting in touch with the latest, cutting-edge advances and applications in these fields. My colleague Phoebe Ayers is the Symposium Chair this year, and I had the great pleasure of being appointed as Program Chair.
This will be (hopefully) my 4th WikiSym in a row. I haven’t missed any edition since the first one I attended, back in 2007 at Montreal. Many people asked me why I’m so eager to come back every year. Well, if you have ever attended WikiSym, you may know why. WikiSym is not the “typical Computer Science” conference. It’s another jewel in a small set of conferences on emerging topics, all of them revolving around collaboration using Internet and ICT.
For those of you who never attended WikiSym in the past, I’d like to offer 5 very good reasons to avoid missing WikiSym 2010: Read more…
As a resarcher focused on quantitative anlyses of on-line communities, I need to keep up-to-date on the field. I have to read papers and articles, written by other colleagues and scholars on related topics. I must search for new methods and algorithms to cut out execution times, and finish before the next deadline. I have to evaluate new tools that let me create new graphs or compute new analyses. And I have to review many papers in different conferences, presenting results in this area. In this context, I’m still surprised by finding the same problem, over and over again.
When I started to study Wikipedia, 4 years ago, I was puzzled by the lack of reproducibility in most (but not all) of the papers and analyses I could find at that time. No source code available. Few implementation details. Little discussion on how to set up a similar environment and replicate the analysis. If you were lucky, you could access some evaluation version of a new cool tool, just to discover that it was deadly limited. Forget about the code. Try and do it yourself, if you can. That’s why, since the very beginning, one of the main goals of my PhD. was to publish an alternative, open source software tool to analyze any language version of Wikipedia. Read more…
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