UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Stuckman, Jeffrey CharlesSubject: search.filters.subject.crawler

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    Analyzing the Wikisphere: Tools and Methods for Wiki Research
    (2010) Stuckman, Jeffrey Charles; Purtilo, James; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    We present tools and techniques that facilitate wiki research and an analysis of wikis found on the internet. We developed WikiCrawler, a tool that downloads and analyzes wikis. With this tool, we built a corpus of 151 Mediawiki wikis. We also developed a wiki analysis toolkit in R, which, among other tasks, fits probability distributions to discrete data, and uses a Monte Carlo method to test the fit. From the corpus we determined that, like Wikipedia, most wikis were authored collaboratively, but users contributed at unequal rates. We proposed a distribution-based method for measuring wiki inequality and compared it to the Gini coefficient. We also analyzed distributions of edits across pages and users, producing data which can motivate or verify future mathematical models of behavior on wikis. Future research could also analyze user behavior and establish measurement baselines, facilitating evaluation, or generalize Wikipedia research by testing hypotheses across many wikis.