The September 2016 Wikimedia Research Showcase:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase

The Monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase is a public showcase of recent research by the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Team, other WMF researchers and occasionally guest presenters. The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 11.30 Pacific Time and live streamed on YouTube.

September 21, 2016

Finding News Citations for Wikipedia By Besnik Fetahu (Leibniz University of Hannover)
Slides: [1]
An important editing policy in Wikipedia is to provide citations for added statements in Wikipedia pages, where statements can be arbitrary pieces of text, ranging from a sentence to a paragraph. In many cases citations are either outdated or missing altogether. In this work we address the problem of finding and updating news citations for statements in entity pages. We propose a two- stage supervised approach for this problem. In the first step, we construct a classifier to find out whether statements need a news citation or other kinds of citations (web, book, journal, etc.). In the second step, we develop a news citation algorithm for Wikipedia statements, which recommends appropriate citations from a given news collection. Apart from IR techniques that use the statement to query the news collection, we also formalize three properties of an appropriate citation, namely: (i) the citation should entail the Wikipedia statement, (ii) the statement should be central to the citation, and (iii) the citation should be from an authoritative source. We perform an extensive evaluation of both steps, using 20 million articles from a real-world news collection. Our results are quite promising, and show that we can perform this task with high precision and at scale.

Designing and Building Online Discussion Systems By Amy X. Zhang (MIT)

Today, conversations are everywhere on the Internet and come in many different forms. However, there are still many problems with discussion interfaces today. In my talk, I will first give an overview of some of the problems with discussion systems, including difficulty dealing with large scales, which exacerbates additional problems with navigating deep threads containing lots of back-and-forth and getting an overall summary of a discussion. Other problems include dealing with moderation and harassment in discussion systems and gaining control over filtering, customization, and means of access. Then I will focus on a few projects I am working on in this space now. The first is Wikum, a system I developed to allow users to collaboratively generate a wiki-like summary from threaded discussion. The second, which I have just begun, is exploring the design space of presentation and navigation of threaded discussion. I will next discuss Murmur, a mailing list hybrid system we have built to implement and test ideas around filtering, customization, and flexibility of access, as well as combating harassment. Finally, I'll wrap up with what I am working on at Google Research this summer: developing a taxonomy to describe online forum discussion and using this information to extract meaningful content useful for search, summarization of discussions, and characterization of communities.