Database Reference
In-Depth Information
even inexpert users to create and/or edit complex Web pages with structured
information, such as internal and external links, tables, images, and videos. Further-
more, the wiki model makes changes to an article immediately available, even if
they contain errors. The German edition of Wikipedia is an exception to this rule. It
has been testing a system of maintaining stable versions of articles to permit readers
access only to versions of articles that have passed certain reviews.
Many features have been implemented to assist contributors. For example, the
“History” page attached to each article records every single past revision of the
article. This feature makes it easy to compare old and new versions, undo changes
that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. The “Discussion” pages
associated with each article are used to coordinate work among multiple editors.
Pieces of software such as Internet bots (e.g., Vandal Fighter) are in wide use to
remove vandalism as soon as it is committed, to correct common misspellings and
stylistic issues, or to ensure that new articles comply with a standard format [ 12 ].
Since Wikipedia grows very dynamically and is human contributed and mainly
composed of free text, the structure of the media collection is very complex. Dumps
of articles are generated automatically every week and can be downloaded to apply
offline analyses of the content.
The basic entry in Wikipedia is an article (or page), which defines and describes
an entity or an event and consists of a hypertext document with hyperlinks to other
pages, within or outside Wikipedia. The role of the hyperlinks is to guide the reader
to pages that provide additional information about the entities or events mentioned
in an article. Each Wikipedia article is uniquely referenced by an identifier, which
consists of one or more words separated by spaces or underscores, and occasionally
a parenthetical explanation. Some articles can contain an Infobox, a table which
sums up key information about the article. The community provides a collection of
templates for different categories (e.g., City, Company) to avoid ambiguous anno-
tations and present information with a uniform layout.
The hyperlinks withinWikipedia are created using the articles' unique identifiers.
Since every article can be edited by any user, one critical issue is the consistency
with respect to these identifiers. “Redirect” pages, which contain only a redirect link,
exist for each alternative name of a concept and point readers to the one preferred by
Wikipedia.
Another issue is the different meanings that words can assume according to the
context. Disambiguation pages are specifically created for these ambiguous entities
and are identified by the parenthetical explanation “(disambiguation)”. These pages
consist of links to articles defining the different meanings of the entity.
2.3 Community Nature and Media Collection Features
Each community-contributed media collection has different features due to both the
structure of the Web service and the managed media type. Many research efforts
have been devoted to studying the structure of social networks [ 13 ], proposing
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