User:Boud/Archive 2

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i'm not sure whether making archives of users' personal pages is really justified - if you think this is getting too much like "personal promotion", please comment here. Boud 20:35, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

wikimania

http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_papers

Important Dates

• DEADLINE VERY VERY SOON Apr 15 - Proposal deadline for speaker panels, workshops and tutorials
• May 10 - Abstract deadline for panels, papers, posters and presentations [Notification: by May 25]
• May 30 - Submission deadline for research paper drafts
• Jun 15 - Final copy of papers and posters due (for printing and translation).
• Jul 10 - Final copy of presentation-slides due
• Aug 4-8 - Wikimania!

official page on presentation

• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-BO1

wikimania proposal guidelines

• Wiki research
• Paper/Presentation (30 minutes to present and discuss a topic)

Submission Details

Each submission should include:

wikimania proposal - draft

• an abstract (a 300-word / 1 page outline)
  • #abstract
• the type of submisson (Poster, Short pres, Workshop, Lecture, other)
  • Lecture
• the language(s) of the submission
  • English (i will provide both (fr) and (en) in the written version)
• its primary author(s) (you may include hyperlinks and/or wiki usernames)
  • en:user:boud = fr:utilisateur:baoud = pl:wikipedysta:boud
• the target audience (any previous knowledge required?)
  • general, but will hopefully include some quantitative analysis (graphs, a few simple formulae)
• a license (GFDL, CC-by, PD, normal copyright, ...)
  • GFDL
• which days the authors can participate in the conference (NB: you may submit work even if you cannot come to the conference in person)
  • any
• Full papers and presentations should also include a draft of the paper or slides for your presentation

Title

The role of positive and negative feedbacks and neutral point of view (NPOV) on meme evolution in the wikisphere

Abstract

The wikisphere (wikis, especially the wikimedia wikis) demonstrates a method of reorganising information that is very different both from state controlled media and from corporate media. In all models of information reorganisation, the massive amount of information potentially obtainable from over six billion people needs to be condensed by factors of a thousand, a million or even a billion if the aim is to give everybody a chance to contribute to knowledge. This high factor of information compression necessarily implies a very high risk of censorship - removing or hiding memes against the interests of the government or the market economy. Does the wikisphere enable undesirable (for the government or for the economy), but correct, memes to survive, and possibly even to become widely distributed? Can this be quantified? Three of the most obvious factors in the wikisphere which distinguish it from government and corporate media are very short time-scale positive and negative feedbacks (adding and removing information) and the neutral point of view (NPOV) principle which, in principle, enables the survival of memes which could otherwise be censored. The aim of this project is to understand something about meme evolution in the wikisphere by quantitatively measuring the roles of some of the positive and negative feedbacks and the NPOV, using the data present in the wikimedia databases. A brief introduction to the concepts and quantitative results will be presented. The software to carry out the full analysis will be available as a GPL package.

thoughts for the project

• standard model for meme distribution:
  • government controlled media - filters for information selection
  • corporate media in capitalist countries - filters studied by Herman and Chomsky
  • positive feedbacks
  • negative feedbacks
• wikidom (wikis and especially wikimedia wikis)
  • entry of raw observations as a fundamental need in order to obtain neutrality, not just NPOV
  • different path types from raw observations (first-hand reports) to wikimedia wiki articles
  • positive feedbacks in wikidom
    • (value positive for going towards "truth") NPOV on wiki enables sensitivity to minorities with convincing arguments so that these exponentially grow despite being dissident points of view
    • (value negative) conflicts can grow due to positive feedback - successively stronger attacks grow exponentially until either the system breaks down or a negative feedback becomes important to dampen it
  • negative feedbacks in wikidom
    • NPOV provides a negative feedback loop to dampen edit wars
• if hypothesised positive/negative feedbacks are correct, these should be measurable from the statistics
  • method
    • Is there an intrinsic methodical difficulty in that the researcher decides, according to his/her own POV, which dissident POVs are correct and correctly (or wrongly) amplified by positive feedbacks, and which are conspiracy theories (or plain rubbish) and correctly (or wrong) dampened by negative feedbacks? Maybe a reasonably objective measure such as absolute or relative numbers of people killed/affected? (Cf Herman and Chomsky with Cambodia vs East Timor in their analysis.)
    • possible memes with measurable evolution and pos/neg feedbacks
      • maybe some ideas from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Deletionist_Wikipedians
      • maybe ideas from List of alternative, speculative and disputed theories
      • do increases/reductions in an article's length represent the effect of positive/negative feedbacks (statistically)?
    • See also: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_sociology
  • data
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm
  • results
  • conclusions (are the hypothesised feedbacks consistent with the empirical dynamics of the data?)

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