Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump fro... more Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump from reading to editing could be too big for some wikipedians who can be intimidated by exposing their content to public scrutiny. Annotating might foster not only reading but also be the prelude to editing. Dierent annotation tools exist for the Web (e.g., Diigo, A.nnotate). Being a Web application, Wikipedia can benet from these tools. However, general-purpose annotation tools do not make annotation a natural gesture within Wikipedia. That is, annotation editing, rendering or retrieval in e.g. Diigo is dissociated from the edition, rendering or location of articles in Wikipedia, hindering the role of annotation as the prelude to article edition. WikiLayer is a Wikipedia-specic annotation tool. The implications include: (1) wikinotes (i.e. annotations on Wikipedia articles) might be WikiText formatted; (2) wikinote rendering is seamlessly integrated within the Wikipedia front-end; (3) wikinote editing, management and sharing is achieved without leaving Wikipedia (no separated annotation repository). WikiLayer is available for Firefox and Chrome.
ABSTRACT The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging ca... more ABSTRACT The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging categories, structuring articles and even moving sections among articles are cumbersome tasks in current wiki engines. This discourages the layman. But, it is the layman who writes the articles, knows the wiki content and detects refactoring opportunities. Our goal is to improve the refactoring affordances of current wiki engines by providing an alternative front-end tuned to refactoring. This is achieved by (1) surfacing the structure of the wiki corpus as a mind map, and (2) conducting refactoring as mind map reshaping. To this end, we introduce WikiWhirl, a domain-specific language for wiki refactoring. WikiWhirl is supported as an extension of FreeMind, a popular mind mapping tool. In this way, refactoring operations are intuitively conducted as actions upon mind map nodes. In a refactoring session a user imports the wiki structure as a FreeMind map; next, conducts the refactoring operations on the map, and finally, the effects are saved in the wiki database. The operational semantics of the WikiWhirl operations follow refactoring good practices (e.g., authorship preservation). Results from a controlled experiment suggest that WikiWhirl outperforms MediaWiki in three main affordance enablers: understandability, productivity and fulfillment of refactoring good practices.
ABSTRACT Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to a gradual degradation of the wiki cont... more ABSTRACT Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to a gradual degradation of the wiki content/structure which, in turn, may entail recurrent wiki refactoring. Unfortunately, no regression test exists to check the validity of the refactoring output. Some changes, even if compliant with good practices, can still require to be backed by the community which ends up bearing the maintenance burden. This calls for a semiautomatic approach where "refactoring bots" interact with wiki users to confirm the upgrades. This paper outlines this as follows. First, a refactoring bot detects wiki degradation. Second, the community evaluates the severity of the degradation through voting. Finally, the refactoring bot takes control and enacts the appropriate changes, if so decided by the community. This lessens but does not exclude, the participation of the community. We aim at reducing the maintenance penalty that goes with the laissez-faire way that characterizes wiki contributions.
Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be ... more Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of contributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting organization. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki openness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of ''Wiki Scaffoldings'', i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate concerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized with boilerplate text, are all introduced in the wiki before any contribution is made. To retain wikis' friendliness and engage layman participation, we propose scaffoldings to be described as mind maps. Mind maps are next ''exported'' as wiki installations. We show the feasibility of the approach introducing a Wiki Scaffolding Language (WSL). WSL is realized as a plugin for FreeMind, a popular tool for mind mapping. Finally, we validate the expressiveness of WSL in four case studies. WSL is available for download.
Notes on numerical fluid mechanics and multidisciplinary design, 2012
Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactor... more Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactoring. So far, wiki refactoring is a manual, time-consuming and error-prone activity. We strive to ease wiki refactoring by using mind maps as a graphical representation of the wiki structure, and mind map manipulations as a way to express refactoring. This paper (i) defines the semantics of common refactoring operations based on Wikipedia best practices, (ii) advocates for the use of mind maps as a visualization of wikis for refactoring, and (iii) introduces a DSL for wiki refactoring built on top of FreeMind, a mind mapping tool. Thus, wikis are depicted as FreeMind maps, and map manipulations are interpreted as refactoring operations over the wiki. The rationales for the use of a DSL are based not only on reliability grounds but also on facilitating end-user participation.
Some wikis support virtual communities that are built around the wiki itself (e.g., Wikipedia). B... more Some wikis support virtual communities that are built around the wiki itself (e.g., Wikipedia). By contrast, corporate wikis are not created in a vacuum since the community already exists. Documentation, organigrams, etc are all there by the time the wiki is created. The wiki should then be tuned to the existing information ecosystem. That is, wiki concerns (e.g., categories, permissions) are to be influenced by the corporate settings. So far, "all wikis are created equal": empty. This paper advocates for corporate wikis to be initialized with a "wiki scaffolding": a wiki installation where some categories, permissions, etc, are initialized to mimic the corporate settings. Such scaffolding is specified in terms of a Domain Specific Language (DSL). The DSL engine is then able to turn the DSL expression into a MediaWiki installation which is ready to be populated but now, along the company settings. The DSL is provided as a FreeMind plugin, and DSL expressions are denoted as mindmaps.
Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be ... more Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of con-tributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting organization. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glos-saries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki open-ness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of Wiki Scaffoldings, i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate con-cerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized ...
Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump fro... more Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump from reading to editing could be too big for some wikipedians who can be intimidated by exposing their content to public scrutiny. Annotating might foster not only reading but also be the prelude to editing. Dierent annotation tools exist for the Web (e.g., Diigo, A.nnotate). Being a Web application, Wikipedia can benet from these tools. However, general-purpose annotation tools do not make annotation a natural gesture within Wikipedia. That is, annotation editing, rendering or retrieval in e.g. Diigo is dissociated from the edition, rendering or location of articles in Wikipedia, hindering the role of annotation as the prelude to article edition. WikiLayer is a Wikipedia-specic annotation tool. The implications include: (1) wikinotes (i.e. annotations on Wikipedia articles) might be WikiText formatted; (2) wikinote rendering is seamlessly integrated within the Wikipedia front-end; (3) wikinote editing, management and sharing is achieved without leaving Wikipedia (no separated annotation repository). WikiLayer is available for Firefox and Chrome.
ABSTRACT The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging ca... more ABSTRACT The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging categories, structuring articles and even moving sections among articles are cumbersome tasks in current wiki engines. This discourages the layman. But, it is the layman who writes the articles, knows the wiki content and detects refactoring opportunities. Our goal is to improve the refactoring affordances of current wiki engines by providing an alternative front-end tuned to refactoring. This is achieved by (1) surfacing the structure of the wiki corpus as a mind map, and (2) conducting refactoring as mind map reshaping. To this end, we introduce WikiWhirl, a domain-specific language for wiki refactoring. WikiWhirl is supported as an extension of FreeMind, a popular mind mapping tool. In this way, refactoring operations are intuitively conducted as actions upon mind map nodes. In a refactoring session a user imports the wiki structure as a FreeMind map; next, conducts the refactoring operations on the map, and finally, the effects are saved in the wiki database. The operational semantics of the WikiWhirl operations follow refactoring good practices (e.g., authorship preservation). Results from a controlled experiment suggest that WikiWhirl outperforms MediaWiki in three main affordance enablers: understandability, productivity and fulfillment of refactoring good practices.
ABSTRACT Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to a gradual degradation of the wiki cont... more ABSTRACT Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to a gradual degradation of the wiki content/structure which, in turn, may entail recurrent wiki refactoring. Unfortunately, no regression test exists to check the validity of the refactoring output. Some changes, even if compliant with good practices, can still require to be backed by the community which ends up bearing the maintenance burden. This calls for a semiautomatic approach where "refactoring bots" interact with wiki users to confirm the upgrades. This paper outlines this as follows. First, a refactoring bot detects wiki degradation. Second, the community evaluates the severity of the degradation through voting. Finally, the refactoring bot takes control and enacts the appropriate changes, if so decided by the community. This lessens but does not exclude, the participation of the community. We aim at reducing the maintenance penalty that goes with the laissez-faire way that characterizes wiki contributions.
Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be ... more Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of contributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting organization. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki openness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of ''Wiki Scaffoldings'', i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate concerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized with boilerplate text, are all introduced in the wiki before any contribution is made. To retain wikis' friendliness and engage layman participation, we propose scaffoldings to be described as mind maps. Mind maps are next ''exported'' as wiki installations. We show the feasibility of the approach introducing a Wiki Scaffolding Language (WSL). WSL is realized as a plugin for FreeMind, a popular tool for mind mapping. Finally, we validate the expressiveness of WSL in four case studies. WSL is available for download.
Notes on numerical fluid mechanics and multidisciplinary design, 2012
Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactor... more Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactoring. So far, wiki refactoring is a manual, time-consuming and error-prone activity. We strive to ease wiki refactoring by using mind maps as a graphical representation of the wiki structure, and mind map manipulations as a way to express refactoring. This paper (i) defines the semantics of common refactoring operations based on Wikipedia best practices, (ii) advocates for the use of mind maps as a visualization of wikis for refactoring, and (iii) introduces a DSL for wiki refactoring built on top of FreeMind, a mind mapping tool. Thus, wikis are depicted as FreeMind maps, and map manipulations are interpreted as refactoring operations over the wiki. The rationales for the use of a DSL are based not only on reliability grounds but also on facilitating end-user participation.
Some wikis support virtual communities that are built around the wiki itself (e.g., Wikipedia). B... more Some wikis support virtual communities that are built around the wiki itself (e.g., Wikipedia). By contrast, corporate wikis are not created in a vacuum since the community already exists. Documentation, organigrams, etc are all there by the time the wiki is created. The wiki should then be tuned to the existing information ecosystem. That is, wiki concerns (e.g., categories, permissions) are to be influenced by the corporate settings. So far, "all wikis are created equal": empty. This paper advocates for corporate wikis to be initialized with a "wiki scaffolding": a wiki installation where some categories, permissions, etc, are initialized to mimic the corporate settings. Such scaffolding is specified in terms of a Domain Specific Language (DSL). The DSL engine is then able to turn the DSL expression into a MediaWiki installation which is ready to be populated but now, along the company settings. The DSL is provided as a FreeMind plugin, and DSL expressions are denoted as mindmaps.
Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be ... more Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of con-tributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting organization. As any other Information System resource, wiki success highly depends on the interplay of technology, work practice and the organization. Thus, wiki contributions should be framed along the concerns already in use in the hosting organization in terms of glos-saries, schedules, policies, organigrams and the like. The question is then, how can corporate strategies permeate wiki construction while preserving wiki open-ness and accessibility? We advocate for the use of Wiki Scaffoldings, i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic these corporate con-cerns: categories, users, templates, articles initialized ...
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Papers by Gorka Puente