Understanding and improving Wikipedia article discussion spaces

  • Authors:

  • Jodi Schneider;Alexandre Passant;John G. Breslin

  • Affiliations:

  • National University of Ireland, Galway;National University of Ireland, Galway;National University of Ireland, Galway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Wikipedia's article discussion spaces ("Talk pages") form a large and growing proportion of the encyclopedia, used for collaboration and article improvement. So far there is no in-depth account of how article Talk pages are used, what is wrong with them, and how they can be improved. This paper reports on three contributions promoting the understanding of and improvement of these spaces: (1) Wikipedia editor interviews provide an increased understanding of readers' and editors' needs, (2) a large-scale comparative content analysis adds to knowledge of what kinds of discussions and coordination occur on Talk pages, (3) a prototype bookmarklet-based system, which we test in a formative user evaluation, integrates lightweight semantics.