Leveraging Wikipedia

The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation states, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” Libraries need not see Wikipedia as competition; rather, failing to leverage its omnipresence in the online world constitutes a missed opportunity. As a senior program officer at OCLC, Proffitt has encouraged collaboration between Wikipedia and cultural heritage institutions, leading to increased visibility and user engagement at participating organizations. Here, she brings onboard a raft of contributors from the worlds of academia, archives, libraries, and members of the volunteer Wikipedia community who together point towards connecting these various communities of knowledge. This book will inspire libraries to get involved in the Wikipedia community through programs and activities such as hosting editathons;contributing content and helping to bridge important gaps in Wikipedia;ensuring that library content is connected through the world’s biggest encyclopedia;working with the Wikipedia education community; andengaging with Wikipedians as allies in a quest to expand access to knowledge. Speaking directly to librarians, this book shows how libraries can partner with Wikipedia to improve content quality while simultaneously ensuring that library services and collections are more visible on the open web.

Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident--a wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopedia--has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of "free access to the sum of all human knowledge" when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued almost 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2012, held in Tianjin, China, in December 2012. The 22 full papers and 26 poster presentations included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: IR models; evaluation and user studies; NLP for IR; machine learning and data mining; social media; IR applications; multimedia IT and indexing; collaborative and federated search; and the poster session.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2014, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in October 2014. The 52 full papers, 16 short and 14 poster papers, presented in the two-volume proceedings LNCS 8786 and 8787 were carefully reviewed and selected from 196 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: Web mining, modeling and classification; Web querying and searching; Web recommendation and personalization; semantic Web; social online networks; software architectures amd platforms; Web technologies and frameworks; Web innovation and applications; and challenge.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2013, held in Beidaihe, China, in June 2013. The 47 revised full papers presented together with 29 short papers and 5 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 248 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data mining; information integration and heterogeneous systems; big data; spatial and temporal databases; information extraction; new hardware and miscellaneous; query processing and optimization; social network and graphs; information retrieval; workflow systems and service computing; recommender systems; security, privacy, and trust; semantic Web and ontology.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First COST Action IC1302 International KEYSTONE Conference on semantic Keyword-based Search on Structured Data Sources, IKC 2015, held in Coimbra, Portugal, in September 2015. The 13 revised full papers, 3 revised short papers, and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 initial submissions. The paper topics cover techniques for keyword search, semantic data management, social Web and social media, information retrieval, benchmarking for search on big data.

This book explores a specific aspect of modern parliamentarism: its ability to produce and organise political knowledge. The book argues that the very meaning of modern parliamentarism cannot properly be understood without considering the cognitive value which is inherent in the representative function discharged by parliaments, vis-a-vis the political community. It does so by studying the 'encyclopaedic patterns' underlying modern parliamentarism. Exploring the concept from ancient times to modernity, it addresses the fundamental question of the relationship between knowledge and democratic decision-making. This is a truly innovative book; challenging, provocative and asking crucial questions of how parliaments work and legislate.