Understanding co-editing mechanism of wiki-based digital humanities projects

Date06 December 2019
Published date06 December 2019
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2019-0214
Pages199-218
AuthorWeihua Deng,Pei Lv,Ming Yi,Ming Liu
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management
Understanding co-editing
mechanism of wiki-based digital
humanities projects
Weihua Deng and Pei Lv
Department of Information Management, College of Public Administration,
Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China, and
Ming Yi and Ming Liu
School of Information Management,
Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reveal the co-editing mechanism aiming at content creation, and an
entry of online encyclopedia is taken as a case, for the purpose of promoting and enhancing the development
of wiki-based digital humanities projects (WDHPs), specifically, the projects that focus on gathering
contextual information in the culture heritage domain.
Design/methodology/approach An exploratory study was conducted by three steps. A representative
entrys editorial records were reorganized to obtain a data set of discussion statements (n¼608), based on
which linked-structures were built, and PageRank algorithm was used to analyze the co-editing process.
Skewness statistic was applied to measure the consensus of co-editing, and consensus evolution over time
was explored. Linear or curve fitting was performed to analyze the correlation between consensus evolution
and its influential factors.
Findings In WDHPs, co-editing activity of content creation can be considered as a large-scale group
discussion, consensus can evaluate the efficiency of co-editing, which evolves with time and is influenced by
the number of statements, breadth and depth of argumentation structure. Taking Mogao Grottoesas an
example, group discussions around 15 key issues dominate the content creating process, consensus is on a
rise with time, finally reaches a relatively high level, and consensus evolution is more influenced by breadth
than by depth of argumentation structure, which indicates that co-editing efficiency of Mogao Grottoesis
fine and more argumentation in a depth manner should be guided.
Practical implications For researchers of WDHPs , it is beneficial to apply online en cyclopedia platform
combining with consens us analysis to develop WDHPs. For designe rs of WDHPs, the elements related to
argumentation struc ture can be absorbed into the design to pro mote co-editing in an effective manne r. For
DH researchers, the analy tic procedure can be benef icial of revealing the inte rest of contributors in a
specific DH field.
Originality/value This research is novel in comprehensively understanding co-editing mechanism of
content creation in WDHPs, resulting in a three-step analytic procedure of presenting co-editing process,
evaluating and improving co-editing efficiency.
Keywords Crowdsourcing, Digital humanities, Consensus, Co-editing, Culture heritage, IBIS
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The digital revolution of the twenty-first century is empowering humanities scholars to
pursue new strategies of collection, organization and evaluation of valuable resources
(Travis and Holm, 2016). Wiki technology, being a prominent Web 2.0 application, has
received intense interest because of its characteristics of collaboration. A certain number of
digital humanities (DH) scholars have leveraged wiki tools to develop DH projects, which are
called as wiki-based DH projects (WDHPs), such as Australian Newspaper Digitization,
Wiki Loves Art,”“Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision,etc. Collaboration is defined
as working together to achieve collective results (Lipnack and Stamps, 1997). In the sense,
Received 25 August 2019
Revised 13 October 2019
Accepted 19 October 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
This work has been supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (16BTQ076).
Wiki-based
digital
humanities
projects
AslibJournalof Information
Management
Vol.72 No. 2, 2020
pp.199-218
©EmeraldPublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI10.1108/AJIM-08-2019-0214
199
most WDHPs have applied Wiki tools in gathering human resources as the specific
collective results. For example, the Australian Newspaper Digitization Project invites users
around the world to calibrate the Optical Character Recognition (OCR)ed newspaper text, a
complex task that is difficult to deal with limited manpower. Nonetheless, collaborative
editing (co-editing) as the core contribution pattern of wiki tools, being proficient in
collaboratively creating web content, still gets a limited application among the current
WDHPs. Existing research has confirmed that co-editing can enable users to be actively
involved and work with peers, to review and share ideas and, finally, to create content in a
collaborative manner (Hadjerrouit, 2014; Bradley et al., 2010). Furthermore, online
encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia) is the successful product of the co-editing pattern, and it
confirms the enormous capacity of co-editing in content creation. Indeed, in the WDHPs of
culture heritage domain, there exists a long tradition that gathering contextual content has
been done by means of writing scientific publications, compiling magazines, etc. (Oomen
and Aroyo, 2011). In this sense, gathering contextual information is similar to content
creation. Therefore, it is evident that co-editing pattern offers an enhanced opportunity to
engage citizen scientists and volunteers in creating scientific content, leading to potential
prosperity of the WDHPs (Bonney et al., 2009; Follett and Strezov, 2015; Zhao, 2017), what
we lack is a clear understanding of the co-editing mechanism of the creating process of
contextual content.
Despite the limited number of WDHPs orient to content creation, online encyclopedia has
become widely recognized as an invaluable way to generate scientific content by co-editing,
and numerous pages of online encyclopedia are devoted to humanities topics. Therefore,
online encyclopedia provides an environment to explorethe co-editing mechanism of WDHPs.
Recently, the co-editing of online encyclopedia has received significant attention. There are a
certain number of literature focusing on the exogenous factors (i.e. technology and
management) about co-editing, such as the function and interaction interface of wiki system
(Li et al., 2004; He and Han, 2006), the organization of contributors (Miller, 2005; Nov, 2007),
editing coordination (Kittur and Kraut, 2008),conflict management (Arazy et al.,2013) and so
on. A few studies focus on co-editing activities, such as encyclopedia contributorsbehaviors
and co-editing patterns (Kittur and Kraut, 2008; Kimmerle et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2018).
However, the scholarly literature has offered little guidance on exploring co-editing
mechanismfrom the perspective of contentcreation. In fact, beingthe target task of co-editing,
content creation has the ability to show a whole picture of how content is collaboratively
created by multiple contributors. This is the gap of the existing literature.
Recently, the emerging web technologies have promoted the prosperity of informal
online conversations, and the well-established theory of group discussion is used to
investigate these issues, leading to a research boom in online discussion theme. Group
discussion is a decision-oriented conversation in which a group weighs pros and cons of
different options, articulates core values, and makes choices in a way that is respectful,
egalitarian, and open (Karacapilidis and Pappis, 2000). Related literature demonstrates a
strong theoretical foundation in such aspects of group discussion as the discussion process
and key elements, which are applied in in-deep exploration of the online discussion
phenomena in various settings, including majority opinion formation through social media
(Netzer et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2018), e-voting activities in public deliberation domain
(Chowdhury et al., 2015), and collaborative learning activities in online educational
environment, and so on. Co-editing in WDHPs is based on Wiki tools which are known to
have some distinct characteristics such as the many-to-many conversation mechanism that
greatly differs from classic collaboration (Arazy and Kopak, 2010). In terms of conversation,
co-editing in WDHPs is similar to online discussion, which exhibits a broad range of
discussion style. Furthermore, wiki platform offers an environment to facilitate
collaborative work by providing the tools for coordinating, consensus building and
AJIM
200
72,2

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