Characterization of the Wikipedia Traffic

Abstract:

Since its inception, Wikipedia has grown to a solid and stable project and turned into a mass collaboration tool that allows the sharing and distribution of knowledge. The wiki approach that basis this initiative promotes the participation and collaboration of users. In addition to visits for browsing its contents, Wikipedia also receives the contributions of users to improve them. In the past, researchers paid attention to different aspects concerning authoring and quality of contents. However, little effort has been made to study the nature of the visits that Wikipedia receives. We conduct such an study using a sample of users' requests provided by the Wikimedia Foundation in the form of Squid log lines. Our sample contains more that 14,000 million requests from users all around the world and directed to all the projects maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, including different editions of Wikipedia. This papers describes the work made to characterize the traffic directed to Wikipedia and consisting of the requests sent by its users. Our main aim is to obtain a detailed description of its composition in terms of the percentages corresponding to the different types of requests making part of it. The benefits from our work may range from the prediction of traffic peaks to the determination of the kind of resources most often requested, which can be useful for scalability considerations.

Conference: The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services (ICIW'12)

Language: English

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Analysis of the Benefits of Wiki Platforms in University Education

Abstract:

The implementation of the Bologna Process has brought a significant change to the university educational system, requiring changes in the core of the degrees themselves as well as in the way in which students are taught, including the means for accessing information. One of its objectives is also to help to increase the compatibility between the different educational programs in the countries of the EU. But the most important changes require the implementation of systems to support the development of the collaborative techniques that students need to learn to be competitive, alongside with better interaction between them and the teachers. These requirements have opened up the way for new multimedia and collaborative tools that can be incorporated to the classroom to fulfill these requirements. Among all these tools, there is one in particular that arises above the rest because of its potential and that has also gained a lot of popularity in the last few years: the wiki platform. It constitutes the main focus of this article, as the tool is currently being researched and studied to improve its adaptability and positive impact in the students’ learning process.

Conference: IADIS International Conference e-Society 2012

Language: English

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Applications of QFT robust control techniques to marine systems

Abstract:

In this work an overview of the application of the Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) technique to different marine systems is presented. Namely the problems of the stabilization of a high-speed craft, the dynamic positioning of a moored platform and the tracking control of a hovercraft are studied. An interesting question is that the plants have less degree of freedom for actuation and is more difficult to control. The three multivariable nonlinear problems are tackled by different procedures. Performance evaluation analyses and simulations in different conditions are carried out. It is shown that robust techniques based on QFT methodology result feasible and very suitable; and therefore they constitute attractive alternatives in the application of stabilization, dynamic positioning and tracking control of advanced marine systems.

Conference: IEEE International Conference on Control & Automation (ICCA'11)

Language: English

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New educational approach based on the use of wiki platforms in university environments

Abstract:

Wikis have become increasingly popular both in corporate and educational environments due to the new ways of working collaboratively that they offer, including new ways to improve the learning process of students and employees. Leading universities worldwide have started implementing their own wikis and applying them to different subjects with success, which made more universities follow their example, to the point where nowadays we can find wikis (some of them still in development) in almost all major universities in the world. Nevertheless, not all of the benefits of wikis in multidisciplinary university environments are always obtained; on the contrary many students and teachers do not use it to its full potential. For this reason, and in pursue of a greater understanding of why this occurs and which methods could be implemented to achieve and reach the wikis full educational potential, in this article a particular initiative in a specific subject of the Computer Science degree is described. The results will contribute to further evaluate the viability and develop the potential of the implementation of wiki platforms in other subjects and degrees, in the hopes of reaching a fully functional multidisciplinary wiki

Conference: 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP'11)

Language: English

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Doctoral Thesis: Temporal and Behavioral patterns in the use of Wikipedia

Abstract:

Wikipedia stands as the most important wiki-based platform and continues providing the overall society with a vast set of contents and media resources related to all the branches of knowledge. Undoubtedly, Wikipedia constitutes one of the most remarkable facts in the evolution of encyclopedias and, also, a complete revolution in the area of knowledge management. Perhaps, its most innovative aspect is the underlying approach that promotes the collaboration and cooperation of users in the building of contents in a voluntary and altruistic manner. The growth of Wikipedia has never stopped since its beginning as well as its popularity. In fact, the number of visits to its different editions has placed its web site within the top-six most visited pages all over the Internet. Such kind of success has spread the use of Wikipedia beyond typical academic environments and has made it become a complete mass phenomenon. Due to this significant relevance, Wikipedia has revealed as a topic of increasing interest for the research community. However, most of the developed research is concerned with the quality and reliability of the offered contents. This previous research focuses on subjects such as reputation and trust, or addresses topics related to the evolution of Wikipedia and its growth tendencies. By contrast, this thesis is aimed to provide and empirical study and an in-depth analysis about the manner in which the different editions Wikipedia are being used by their corresponding communities of users. In this way, our main objective is the finding of temporal and behavioral patterns describing the different kinds of contents and interactions requested by Wikipedia users. Users' requests are expressed in the form of URLs submitted to Wikipedia as a part of the traffic directed to its supporting servers. The analysis presented here, basically, consists in the characterization of this traffic and has been developed by parsing and filtering the information elements extracted from the URLs contained in it.

Temporal characterization of the requests to Wikipedia

Abstract:

This paper presents an empirical study about the temporal patterns characterizing the requests submitted by users to Wikipedia. The study is based on the analysis of the log lines registered by the Wikimedia Foundation Squid servers after having sent the appropriate content in response to users’ requests. The analysis has been conducted regarding the ten most visited editions of Wikipedia and has involved more than 14,000 million log lines corresponding to the traffic of the entire year 2009. The conducted methodology has mainly consisted in the parsing and filtering of users’ requests according to the study directives. As a result, relevant information fields have been finally stored in a database for persistence and further characterization. In thia way, we, first assessed, whether the traffic to Wikipedia could serve as a reliable estimator of the overall traffic to all the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Our subsequent analysis of the temporal evolutions corresponding to the different types of requests to Wikipedia revealed interesting differences and similarities among them that can be related to the users’ attention to the Encyclopedia. In addition, we have performed separated characterizations of each Wikipedia edition to compare their respective evolutions over time.

Conference: 5th International Workshop on new Challenges in Distributed Information Filtering and Retrieval (DART'11)

Language: English

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A quantitative examination of the impact of featured articles in Wikipedia

Abstract:

This paper presents a quantitative examination of the impact of the presentation of featured articles as quality content in the main page of several Wikipedia editions. Moreover, the paper also presents the analysis performed to determine the number of visits received by the articles promoted to the featured status. We have analyzed the visits not only in the month when articles awarded the promotion or were included in the main page, but also in the previous and following ones. The main aim for this is to assess the attention attracted by the featured content and the different dynamics exhibited by each community of users in respect to the promotion process. The main results of this paper are twofold: it shows how to extract relevant information related to the use of Wikipedia, which is an emerging research topic, and it analyzes whether the featured articles mechanism achieve to attract more attention.

Conference: International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT'11)

Language: English

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El peligro de los blobs en los kernels libres

Journal: Revista Novatica (08/2011)

Language: Spanish

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A statistical approach to the impact of featured articles in Wikipedia

Abstract:

This paper presents an empirical study on the impact of featured articles on the attention that Wikipedia’s articles attract, and how this behavior differs in different editions of Wikipedia. The study is based on the analysis of the log lines registered by the Wikimedia Foundation Squid servers after having sent the appropriate content in response to the corresponding request submitted by any Wikipedia user. The analysis has been conducted regarding the six most visited editions of the Wikipedia and has involved more than 4,100 million log lines corresponding to the traffic of September, October and November 2009. The methodology of work has mainly consisted on the parsing of the requests sent by the users and on their subsequent filtering according to the study directives. Relevant information fields has been finally stored in a database for persistence and further characterization. The main results of this paper are twofold: it shows how to use the the traffic log to extract information about the use of Wikipedia, which is a novel research approach without precedences in the research community, and it analyzes whether the featured articles mechanism achieve to attract more attention or not.

Conference: International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD'10)

Language: English

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El software libre amenazado: código binario sin fuentes en el kernel Linux

Journal: Revista Novática Num. 206 (08/2010)

Language: Spanish

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Análisis de la incorporación de una plataforma Wiki a la docencia de la asignatura "Nuevas Tecnologías de la Información"

Abstract:

This paper describes the study carried out in order to analyze and evaluate the use of a wikibased platform as a supporting element in the student learning process. The Wiki platform is also analyzed as a tool providing services in teaching of subjects related to New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Moreover, this work focuses on the necessary metrics to be obtained in order to establish use and behavioural patterns which allow to characterize the user-platform relationships and may lead to describe possible students’ attitudes when facing tasks demanding cooperative and collaborative efforts..

Journal: Revista de Docencia Universitaria. Año III. Número Monográfico IV: Número especial dedicado a WIKI y educación superior en España (II parte) (2009/12)

Language: Spanish

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A quantitative approach to the use of the Wikipedia

Abstract:

This paper presents a quantitative study of the use of the Wikipedia system by its users (both readers and editors), with special focus on the identification of time and kind-ofuse patterns, characterization of traffic and workload, and comparative analysis of different language editions. The basis of the study is the filtering and analysis of a large sample of the requests directed to the Wikimedia systems for six weeks during the range of months comprising November 2007 to April 2008. In particular, we have considered the twenty most frequently visited language editions of the Wikipedia, identifying for each access to any of them the corresponding namespace (sets of resources with uniform semantics), resource name (article names, for example) and action (editions, submissions, history reviews, save operations, etc.). The results found include the identification of weekly and daily patterns, and several correlations between several actions on the articles. In summary, the study shows an overall picture of how the most visited language editions of the Wikipedia are being accessed by their users.

Conference: IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'09)

Language: English

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Workshop on Interdisciplinary Research on Wikipedia and Wiki Communities

Abstract:

A growing number of projects seek to build upon the collective intelligence of Internet users, looking for more dynamic, open and creative approaches to content creation and knowledge sharing. To this end, many projects have chosen the wiki, and it is therefore the subject of much research interest, particularly Wikipedia, from varied disciplines. The array of approaches to study wikis is a source of wealth, but also a possible source of confusion: What are appropriate methodologies for the analysis of wiki communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) for study in wiki evolution and outcomes? Is it possible to find effective interdisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these dynamic, creative environments? This workshop intends to provide an opportunity to explore these questions, by researchers and practitioners willing to participate in a "brainstorming research meeting".

Conference: ACM WikiSym 2008: 4th International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym'08)

Language: English

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