Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Automatically Evaluating the
Quality of Contents Created
by Open Collaborative
Knowledge Building
Kwong Bor Ng
Queens College, CUNY, USA
AbstrACt
Using wikis, with minimum planning, significant projects can be accomplished almost effortlessly by
collaborative knowledge building through continuous contributions from caring community members.
Since any registered member can change the content of a wiki page at any time, how to enhance the
quality of a wiki becomes a pressing issue. This paper reports a pilot study of identifying factors that
can enhance the quality of contents built by open collaborative knowledge building. Using stepwise
discriminant analysis and logistic regression, several variables were successfully identified that could
contribute positively to the high quality of wiki pages. The result was analyzed using Receiver Operating
Characteristic (ROC) curves from signal detection theory. The predictor worked remarkably well and
was promising, with a high detection rate and a low false-alarm rate. The finding can help programmers
and architects of open collaborative knowledge building systems to design and implement mechanisms
that will facilitate high quality content creations.
introduCtion: the quAlity
oF Wiki Content
WikiWikiWeb was then installed in an Internet
domain (i.e., URL: http://c2.com) in 1995. Since
it was basically used by a small group of computer
programmers, quality control of individual wiki
page was not an issue. Until the end of the last
century, not too much people know about wikis.
Wiki became very popular primarily due to the
success of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org,
see also Ebersbach
et al
2008) which was launched
The first wiki, with the name WikiWikiWeb (also
known as WardsWiki, see Figure 1), was invented
by Ward Cunningham in 1994 in order to make the
exchange of ideas between programmers easier
(“WikiWikiWeb History”).
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