Introducing New Features to Wikipedia: Case Studies for Web Science

... That said, there are times when the Foundation staff had to make a controversial decision about whether to modify the basic functionality of MediaWiki. However, decisions that affect the entire community (or even just entire language versions of Wikipedia) can take years to sort out – as did, for example, the controversies over the rollout of the Flagged Revisions extension (Birn et al., 2013; Schindler & Vrandecic, 2009). For most of Wikipedia's history, controversial platform-level changes to MediaWiki's code were so rare that there is still no agreed-upon model for how those kinds of decisions are even to be made – as we would presume would be in place in Lessig's ideal model of platform governance. ...

... Despite the decentralized nature of the Wikipedia, there are currently some studies that analyse the quality of the contents of the Wikipedia that assure that its quality is almost as good as other well reputed encyclopedias [39, 40]. In such a vast environment, where millions of encyclopedical entries and millions of users interact it has been necessary to introduce new tools and fea- tures [41] to improve not only the quality of the entries, but the coordination [42, 27], cooperation [43] among the users, the social transparency of the articles [44] and the semantic annotation of the contents [45]. However, it is still necessary to develop new tools to avoid conflict [46] and increase the consensus of the decisions taken in Wikipedia. ...

... For effective interoperability, a LO must be a stand-alone, modular entity that incorporates its learning context (semantic relationships) in its own metadata . Metadata labeling is a key issue for semantic annotation, encoding, exchanging and reusing LOs, as it offers a successful way to catalogue and navigate its content, context, usage and structure [4, 2, 5, 3, 6] . This is valid for adaptive courseware generation, where the goal is to ensure a student completes the required activities, and dynamic courseware generation, where the goal is to assist students in navigating a complex hypermedia space. ...