Grants:TPS/physikerwelt/WWW2017/Report

Poster for the paper A Vision for performing Social and Economic Data Analysis using Wikipedia's edit history presented by Moritz Schubotz at the WWW 2017 wiki workshop.

Teaser presentation for the paper "A Vision for performing Social and Economic Data Analysis using Wikipedia's edit history" presented by Moritz Schubotz at the WWW 2017 wiki workshop.

Event name

WWW conference 2017

Participant connections

I established contact to several other researchers who analyze Wikipedia editing behavior and met a visually impaired Wikipedia user, whose needs I address in one of my other projects – the math rendering engine mathoid. I also met Volker Sorge, Niels Dalum Hansen, and Leila Zia, who I knew before.

Outcome

I arrived in Perth on my 30th Birthday, April 3rd, 2017 at 1pm. After checking into a nice Airbnb apartment close to the conference location, I explored the area. During my stroll, I accidently stumbled into the conference barbeque, where I met Volker Sorge and a blind woman, who desperately needs an alternative way to read mathematical formulae in Wikipedia. I have been trying to address this need by integrating the speech rule engine of Volker into the math rendering engine of Wikipedia mathoid. Unfortunately, the speech rule engine is currently disabled in production, because its speed is not yet sufficient. At our encounter, Volker told me that he has achieved significant performance improvements in the latest beta version of the speech rule engine. I hope that these improvements will enable the activation of the speech rule engine in the productive mathoid service used for rendering math in Wikipedia. Moreover, I met PhD students I already knew from other conferences such as SIGIR or CICM. We discussed about the motivations for pursuing a PhD, and our visions for open science. Maybe, advances in science would be more efficient if sharing results - including negative results - would be as easy as editing Wikipedia.

On the following day, I participated in the wiki workshop. I very much enjoyed the interactive setting of the workshop. For example, participants were invited to exchange name tags and introduce the person with who they exchanged their name tag. I “became” Ricardo Baeza-Yates; who later gave a keynote talk on different errors caused by the characteristics of web datasets and possible misinterpretation of that data. He drew a connection between all those problems by interpreting the effects as different forms of bias. To me, this was an eye-opening talk, since it framed different effects under the unified term bias.

During the main poster session, I had several interesting discussions about our research project on analyzing Wikipedia’s edit history for social any economic data analysis. In particular, a sociologist strongly encouraged me to realize our vision to substantially accelerate research in sociology. I also had interesting discussions on Impact measures for Wikipedia editors with Thomas Arnold who also presented a paper at the workshop. I hope, we will carry out a joint research project in the future on the author impact topic. After the workshop, Leila Zia answered my questions on the current and future research of the Research and Data Team at Wikimedia. Especially the works on revision scoring supports the efforts of my students in Berlin. On the day after the workshop, I travelled back to Germany. Even though the journey to and from Australia took as long as my actual stay in Australia, it was absolutely worth the effort. All the connections and experiences I made will influence my research for the next years.

Finances

• Flight 1545.82 EUR (1654.11 USD)
• Conference Registration 300 AUD (226.27 USD)
• Accommodation 55 USD
• Local transportation AUD 35 (26.40 USD)

Total: $1961.78

Amount left over

$0

Anything else

The paper is available from [1]. The poster and the slides for the teaser presentation at the workshop were uploaded to Wiki commons.