Implementation

The system contains only participants, pages and links. Participants can act over pages. All participants’ actions over the pages are recorded and used for the wiki system dynamics analysis.

Two types of directed links are maintained in the system:

■ Pagelinks are links between pages, established at the creation of a page and as a result of linking two existing pages.

■ Uplinks are links between participants and pages. These links are created as a result of the system analysis. For creating those links “Collaboration” button is used. Uplinks may vary in thickness, which depends on the contribution of the participant to editing the page.

Links between pages are hidden. The thickness of the link between user and page depends on the number of edits that the participant made

Netlogo wiki systems modeling

Evgeny Patarakin, Boris Yarmakhov, Vasiliy BurovWikiVote! Moscow, Russia, {Patarakin, Yarmakhov, Burov}@wikivote.ru

ESSA-2011

Conclusion and Next Steps

The model can be used for various wiki scenarios analysis and prediction regardless of the participants’ abilities.

Our approach were highly appreciated by the Russian authorities. The government made a decision to build in 2012 a permanent Web service, based on our technology. The service will be used to support public consultations on all issues of social importance and publish reports on amendments to legislative initiatives based on the consultations.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/community/wikimodel

Links between participants and pages

Models of wiki cases

The model user interface

Separate page branches

The Letopisi project, created in 2006 http://letopisi.ru. Its model is based on a set of simple rules:•Participants have limited reading abilities.•Participants have limited abilities to link pages.•Participants have high ability to create new pages.

In April 2010 we developed a crowdsourcing platform for evaluating and editing the draft for the new laws. Each item of the Law was posted on the site as a separate page. Upon registration users could make a vote in favor or against the draft, comment on it or suggest their own versions. For testing this approach we used agent based wiki-model with a set of simple rules:The system is populated only with administrators. Administrators publish content for further discussion and editing Participants can create separate versions of initial (white) pages.

Introduction

A number of new social phenomena, such as wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, wikinomics has emerged in recent years. Understanding crowdsourcing requires tools for analysis and models for simulating its various aspects. We developed a model with which we can discuss and predict behavior of wiki communities in the process of collaborative document creation. The model is based on the Netlogo programming language.

Methodology

Wikis as ecological systems which consist of multiple human and programmed agents, following certain rules and an environment of various objects, pages, templates and categories and links between them. All the elements of the wiki environment s can be reused. The transclusion mechanism allows to use wikis as building blocks and construct complicated metabolic chains. Our model is based on Jyri Engeström theory that social networks only work if they are organized around a core social object and a verb that defines how people manipulate that object.

Literature Cited2. West, James A, (2009). Using Wikis for Online

Collaboration: The Power of the Read-Write Web 1st ed., San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

3. Engestrom J. Why some social network services work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centered sociality, April 13th, 2005,

4. Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.