Submissions/Domain-Specific Wikis

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 2508

Title of the submission: Domain-Specific Wikis

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): presentation

Author of the submission: Dr. Vadim Zaytsev

E-mail address: Special:EmailUser/Spider or vadimgrammarware.net

Username: User:Spider

Country of origin: born in Russia, working in The Netherlands

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Personal homepage or blog: http://grammarware.net

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikipedia is a successful project aiming for collecting and sharing “the sum of all human knowledge”. Over the last decade it has gathered considerable volume of textual and audiovisual data, most of which is neatly linked, tagged and categorised to enable not just access to it, but also its reuse. The recent rise of Wikidata has shown both that we need to add more annotations to the existing data, and that a lot of those annotations can be added in an automatic or semi-automated fashion.

However, there are at least three ways in which Wikipedia does not always satisfy the objectives of a community striving towards a wiki-encyclopaedia . The first reason is the topic: many words of the natural language are ambiguous and can assume different meanings in various contexts; and limiting the topics covered by one wiki-encyclopaedia is one of the very effective ways to deal with ambiguities. The second reason is a smaller community: instead of aiming at the mankind as a whole, one can focus a wiki-encyclopaedia to satisfy the information needs and notability guidelines of a particular target audience. The third reason is a technical one: some wiki-encyclopaedias rely on semantic extensions or manually programmed ways to access them, which are crucial for their success.

These three obstacles can be overcome by switching to “domain-specific wikis”, which commit to a particular domain and have a special market for their open data. Such a domain can be a work of art, in which case the wiki community is its fanbase, or an academic research field, in which case the ones contributing and profiting from the wiki are students and scientists, or anything else that can be clearly defined and targeted.

In this presentation, I will explain the domain-specific wikis phenomenon in detail, share my personal successful experience with them and discuss social and technical consequences of living in the world of heterogeneous domain-specific wikis.

Track: Free Culture or Education Outreach

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: nope, unless the scholarship request gets through

Slides or further information (optional)

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Econterms (talk) 20:18, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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