Belated Readings: Week 8

Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations

What are the main problems of the Wikipedia as described by the authors, and how does the community deal with them?
Vandalism: Mainly consist of Mass deletion; Offensive copy; Phony copy; Phony redirection, Idiosyncratic copy. The authors of this paper used their history flow to visually show when a mass deletion occurred. From the version histories, it was noticed that the average response time to correct this was approximately 3 min. across 3574 different articles.

Anonymity vs. authorship: There exist different opinions pertaining authorship and anonymity. Some users prefer to stay anonymous even while contributing substantial information to the available articles. Authorship allows an improved credibility rating where new users contribution could be checked, either for vandalism or perhaps assistance when they are unfamiliar with the community rules and standards.

Negotiation: This occurs when users disagree upon the content and users continuously revert to previous versions. This is resolved with an addition talk meta-page linked to each article which allows users to discuss and resolve their differences regarding the specific article.

Temporal Patterns and Content stability: Due to any user being able to edit the content, there is usually a notable growth in the size of a wiki article. There exist situations where the article size shrinks between edits, and in these cases text has normally been transferred to a new article and is accessed through a redirection link.


A content-driven reputation system for the Wikipedia

What different notions of reputation in Wikipedia do the authors discuss?
Content-Driven Reputation: This is a system where the “Text life” and the “Edit life” of your contribution determine how your reputation is affected. If your contributions last while other users of with high reputation edits around your contribution and leaves the main part intact, then your reputation is increased with a factor of the co-contributors as well as the age of your contribution. Alternatively, if your contributions are quickly reverted, your reputation is reduced with a factor of the reputation of the user that reverted your contribution.

This reputation system reduces the possibility for users to unfairly affect the reputation of another user. The only way that you can increase or reduce another user’s reputation is when your contribution respective to their contribution withstands the test of time. In effect, you put your own reputation on the line whenever you add or remove content.

Prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive reputation:
This system has a prescriptive, descriptive and predictive value. Prescriptive value is gained when the user follows the prescribed behavior within the system, which is built up by contributing lasting content. Descriptive value implies the quality of the contribution, which is used as guide to the trustworthiness of newly contributed text. And finally, a predictive value, where the future contribution of a user will be rated by the number of recent valuable contributions.

Belated Readings: Week 7

Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration; and
Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk

What opportunities/benefit do the authors claim for introducing Enterprise 2.0/Blogging technologies into the enterprise?

Enterprise 2.0 applications defined by SLATES

Keyword	Benefits
Search	Easier to locate information within the intranet
Links	Beneficial when dense link structures reflect opinions of the users
Authoring	Company wikis and blogs have similar to blogging technologies described below
Tags	Better categorization of content and folksonomies; Assist in tracking useful intranet information
Extensions	Assist in automatic tagging and categorization of content
Signals	I.e. RSS technologies assist in keeping track of new content

Not all employees within an enterprise will benefit the same amount from Enterprise 2.0 and Blogging utilities. Employees can be split into 3 groups

1. Contributors or heavy users
2. Active or medium users
3. Inactive or low users

Benefits obtained from using blogging technologies can split into the following 3 sections

1. Work-related and Informational
2. Improved Social networking and Communication
3. Other

Belated Readings: Week 6

Building collaboration into IDEs
What are the major collaborative features suggested by the authors?
The question arises as to why it is beneficial to integrate collaboration within IDEs instead of using external tools for the collaboration process? This is addressed by considering the following 3 collaborative processes.

Configuration Management: Integrating this reduces the effort required to perform shared file management operations. Properly done, this provides the functionality that configuration management is as easy as managing files on the local system. This would add similar benefit as integrating the debugger and linker into the same IDE, by saving time and effort using different tools.

Screen Sharing: Problems are often solved by discussing code between developers. Integrated this into the IDE keeps the data within the IDE context and can easily be used for reference afterwards.

E-mail and IM: This ties the informal discussion between developers into formal source code and repository branches. Another great benefit is traceability, where questions and answers about a particular code are available within the idea, reducing the possibility of losing this information within a normal email or server.

When adding collaboration features it is necessary to

• Accommodate a variety of processes, both formal and informal, because requirements between different groups and teams may vary
• Provide a flexible collection of ways that developers can collaborate to allow groups to choose which features to use
• Be configurable and extensible by the developers themselves

The following capabilities flexibly accommodate various group dynamics regarding programming

• Provide peripheral awareness of other programmers and their activities
• Support a variety of communication mechanisms
• Integrate with the team's source-code control system and bug tracking system
• Support "in context" communication, both synchronous and asynchronous
• Support searching through saved team artifacts and the development history