Research:Wikiwho Provenance Api
 | This page in a nutshell: This research aims to provide an API for retrieving provenance and change information of single tokens in any arbitrary Wikipedia article revision. |
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
Goal
[edit]We aim to provide a performant API to request for every single token (words functional characters) in any specified Wikipedia article the revision of origin for that token, and all changes ever applied to it - with high accuracy. In this way metadata like the original author and the presence (in revision and/or time) of each token in the past can be retrieved - this can also be used for extracting disputes about content.
We currently offer the service in English, German, Turkish and Basque, with more languages planned.
Current State
[edit]A beta version of the API is live and working for en.wikipedia.org, although we are working on the performance. See API and documentation here: https://api.wikiwho.net/api/
Methods
[edit]The algorithm used to mine provenance for single tokens is described in our corresponding paper, including runtime and precision evaluations for English.[1] Further information can also be found at f-squared.org/wikiwho in Internet Archive.
Regarding the "precision" of the method: Former research [1][2] has shown that the task of identifying the "correct" original author of a piece of text in a WP article is not trivial. Therefore we rely on an extraction method that has to be scientifically proven to perform at 95% percent precision[1] , higher than any other algorithm proposed for the task, as far as we can tell. We think that this is crucial if used in production.
Use Cases
[edit]
Apart from direct queries to the WikiWho api, there are some use cases already:
- Use case 1: whoCOLOR: this is a userscript that highlights selected text pieces in an article annotated with their provenance (author). Other features currently being build include a conflict view that highlights the most deleted and reintroduced text pieces, as well as a word history view that shows for each word/token when it was originally introduced and it's individual deletion/reintroduction history. See examples, description, screenshots and download link at this website: f-squared.org/whovisual. Described in a ICWSM workshop paper.[3]
- Use case 2: whoVIS: A prototype of an editor-editor interaction network visualization for individual articles, based on the word/tokens deleted and reintroduced by editors. Also at f-squared.org/whovisual. A WWW Conference demo paper describes the system.[4]
- Use case 3: WikiEdu Dashboard (see "Assessment tools" -> Article symbol)
References
[edit]- ↑ a b c Flöck, Fabian, and Maribel Acosta. "WikiWho: Precise and efficient attribution of authorship of revisioned content." Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web. ACM, 2014.
- ↑ Luca de Alfaro , Michael Shavlovsky, Attributing authorship of revisioned content, Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, May 13-17, 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- ↑ Flöck, Fabian, et al. "Towards Better Visual Tools for Exploring Wikipedia Article Development–The Use Case of “Gamergate Controversy”." Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2015.
- ↑ Flöck, Fabian, and Maribel Acosta. "whovis: Visualizing editor interactions and dynamics in collaborative writing over time." Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2015.