The aim of this Master’s thesis is to examine how librarians, information specialists and teachers discuss Wikipedia within national (Swedish) professional journals. Questions asked in the study are: How is Wikipedia perceived in the professional journals? What different positions do writers and commentators take in relation to Wikipedia? 133 articles from 31 different professional journals in the period from 2001 to the middle of 2010 were analysed. The theory and method used is Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory from which we created our own model with sex different steps. The results show that there are several recurring discussions, for example about the credibility of user generated content. Another example is the discussion about the use of Wikipedia within the education and school contexts and whether the encyclopedia should be seen as sufficiently credible to use in these contexts. From these discussions we have identified three discourses that we have chosen to call: the knowledge-liberal discourse, the knowledge-conservative discourse and the pedagogical discourse. / Program: Bibliotekarie

In recent years social media has become ubiquitous and necessary for social networking and content sharing. Social media reached a stage where its impact is being felt by larger organizations that exist today. It has become necessary for the organizations to re-examine their existing business processes and formulate new business processes to compete in the globalized markets. In our paper we are going to deal with issues like how the social media affect the business processes and why they are affecting the business processes in contemporary organizations. The success of a business depends on effective implementation of its business processes. So these business processes when being designed several factors are being taken into consideration. Social media facilitates for the conjecture of a mixture of people from different domains for sharing of content, it serves as an important and indispensable factor in defining business processes. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

This essay is investigating what type of sources we trust, depending on how the information in these sources is created and provided. To exemplify, the sources Wikipedia and Nationalencyklopedin (the Swedish National Encyclopedia) were used, each one representing different approaches. The first is a representation of the collective intelligence, where anyone can contribute with their knowledge to the public – freedom under responsibility. The latter represents peer-reviewed knowledge, desirable enough to have people paying for it– true and unaffected.Based on theories of source criticism, collective intelligence, expertise and the different generations of digital natives and digital immigrants, two focus groups were conducted and analysed. A group of upper secondary school students and a group of retirees were presented with encoded texts from both encyclopedias, which they analysed critically from their opinion on reliability and objectivity. Their reasoning shows a well demonstrated awareness of the need of a critical reasoning and information literacy when dealing with different sources. But the question remained, particularly in regards to the students, if they do after all practice these skills in their information retrieval. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The thesis Web 2.0 and its impact on business introduces the Web 2.0 concept and its characteristics in the first chapter. Owing to the fact that Web 2.0 is still a controversial theme to a certain extent, the following chapter is focused on the question, whether Web 2.0 is only a marketing label (buzzword) or a conception with a real content. In the third chapter there are examples of concrete web applications and services, which illustrates the areas, where the new Web is successfully established. These representatives are Web 2.0 flagships to a certain degree and for many people synonymous with this term too. The thesis is also concerned with the possibilities of commercial Web 2.0 usage. Web 2.0 has been discussed for several years and since relevant services have been in existence, there have been visible impacts of those new Webs on business. The last but one chapter deals with its possible impacts on selected areas of business. The content of the last chapter is a contemplation on how the Web is going to develop in the next years. There are also discussed social questions connected with quick development of the Internet and Web 2.0.

Most of the reference information, nowadays, is found in repositories of documents semantically linked, created in a collaborative fashion and freely available in the web. Among the many problems faced by content providers in these repositories, one of the most important is Wikification, that is, the placement of links in the articles. These links have to support user navigation and should provide a deeper semantic interpretation of the content. Wikification is a hard task since the continuous growth of such repositories makes it increasingly demanding for editors. As consequence, they have their focus shifted from content creation, which should be their main objective. This has motivated the design of automatic Wikification tools which, traditionally, address two distinct problems: (a) how to identify which words (or phrases) in an article should be selected as anchors and (b) how to determine to which article the link, associated with the anchor, should point. Most of the methods in literature that address these problems are based on machine learning approaches which attempt to capture, through statistical features, characteristics of the concepts and its associations. Although these strategies handle the repository as a graph of concepts, normally they take limited advantage of the topological structure of this graph, as they describe it by means of human-engineered link statistical features. Despite the effectiveness of these machine learning methods, better models should take full advantage of the information topology if they describe it by means of data-oriented approaches such as matrix factorization. This indeed has been successfully done in other domains, such as movie recommendation. In this work, we fill this gap, proposing a wikification prediction model that combines the strengths of traditional predictors based on statistical features with a latent component which models the concept graph topology by means of matrix factorization. By comparing our model with a state-of-the-art wikification method, using a sample of Wikipedia articles, we obtained a gain up to 13% in F1 metric. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the model performance showing the importance of the latent predictor component and the attributes derived from the associations between the concepts. The study still includes the analysis of the impact of ambiguous concepts, which allows us to conclude the model is resilient to ambiguity, even though does not include any explicitly disambiguation phase. We finally study the impact of selecting training samples from specific content quality classes, an information that is available in some respositories, such as Wikipedia. We empirically shown that the quality of the training samples impact on precision and overlinking, when comparing training performed using random quality samples versus high quality samples. / Atualmente, informações de referência são disponibilizadas através de repositórios de documentos semanticamente ligados, criados de forma colaborativa e com acesso livre na Web. Entre os muitos problemas enfrentados pelos provedores de conteúdo desses repositórios, destaca-se a Wikification, isto é, a inclusão de links nos artigos desses repositórios. Esses links possibilitam a navegação pelos artigos e permitem ao usuário um aprofundamento semântico do conteúdo. A Wikification é uma tarefa complexa, uma vez que o crescimento contínuo de tais repositórios resulta em um esforço cada vez maior dos editores. Como consequência, eles têm seu foco desviado da criação de conteúdo, que deveria ser o seu principal objetivo. Isso tem motivado o desenvolvimento de ferramentas de Wikification automática que, tradicionalmente, abordam dois problemas distintos: (a) como identificar que palavras (ou frases) em um artigo deveriam ser selecionados como texto de âncora e (b) como determinar para que artigos o link, associado ao texto de âncora, deveria apontar. A maioria dos métodos na literatura que abordam esses problemas usam aprendizado de máquina. Eles tentam capturar, através de atributos estatísticos, características dos conceitos e seus links. Embora essas estratégias tratam o repositório como um grafo de conceitos, normalmente elas pouco exploram a estrutura topológica do grafo, uma vez que se limitam a descrevê-lo por meio de atributos estatísticos dos links, projetados por especialistas humanos. Embora tais métodos sejam eficazes, novos modelos poderiam tirar mais proveito da topologia se a descrevessem por meio de abordagens orientados a dados, tais como a fatoração matricial. De fato, essa abordagem tem sido aplicada com sucesso em outros domínios como recomendação de filmes. Neste trabalho, propomos um modelo de previsão para Wikification que combina a força dos previsores tradicionais baseados em atributos estatísticos, projetados por seres humanos, com um componente de previsão latente, que modela a topologia do grafo de conceitos usando fatoração matricial. Ao comparar nosso modelo com o estado-da-arte em Wikification, usando uma amostra de artigos Wikipédia, observamos um ganho de até 13% em F1. Além disso, fornecemos uma análise detalhada do desempenho do modelo enfatizando a importância do componente de previsão latente e dos atributos derivados dos links entre os conceitos. Também analisamos o impacto de conceitos ambíguos, o que permite concluir que nosso modelo se porta bem mesmo diante de ambiguidade, apesar de não tratar explicitamente este problema. Ainda realizamos um estudo sobre o impacto da seleção das amostras de treino conforme a qualidade dos seus conteúdos, uma informação disponível em alguns repositórios, tais como a Wikipédia. Nós observamos que o treino com documentos de alta qualidade melhora a precisão do método, minimizando o uso de links desnecessários.

Objetivo: Determinar la presencia y analizar la pertinencia de la información sobre las ciencias de la alimentación y de la nutrición en las ediciones española e inglesa de la Wikipedia. Así como su utilidad para la educación y formación al comparar la terminología, presencia y adecuación del contenido, con una enciclopedia de ámbito general ampliamente utilizada por estudiantes (Enciclopedia Mini Larousse). Método: La terminología especializada sobre nutrición se obtuvo del Diccionario LID de Metabolismo y Nutrición, 1ª edición de 2007, como patrón de comparación. Se calculó la muestra a estudio mediante muestreo aleatorio simple sin reposición, efectuando la estimación de parámetros poblacionales (valor esperado aproximado a 0,5, precisión del intervalo 0,05 y nivel de confianza=0,95) en una población infinita (número muestral 386). La fecha final de la consulta y cálculos fue el 1 de julio de 2012. Resultados: De los 386 términos a estudio, se encontraron 261 términos (67,62%; IC 95%: 62,95-72,28) en la edición española y 306 (79,27%, IC 95%: 75,23-83,32) en la inglesa. Existiendo diferencias significativas entre las dos ediciones (chi-cuadrado=187,37; gl=1; p<0,001). También existieron diferencias estadísticamente significativas, relacionadas con la adecuación, entre ambas ediciones (chi-cuadrado=41,66; gl=1; p<0,001). Asimismo, se probó diferencias entre las dos ediciones en relación a las referencias contenidas en los términos (t-Student=-7,19; gl=460,17; p<0,001). Y en el número de visitas/día (t-Student=-5,75; gl=488,10; p<0,001). No evidenciándose diferencias, en la actualidad/obsolescencia, entre las dos ediciones estudiadas (t-Student=1,14; gl=563; p=0,256). Al comparar las entradas existentes entre la Enciclopedia Mini Larousse y la edición española de Wikipedia, se constató diferencias significativas a favor de la segunda (chi-cuadrado=49,97; gl=1; p<0,001). Conclusiones: Se advierte que la terminología a estudio está menos presente en la edición española de la Wikipedia que la edición inglesa. La adecuación de los contenidos puede considerarse apropiada, existiendo diferencias entre la edición española y la inglesa. La actualización de la terminología estudiada es notable y difícil de igualar por otras formas de edición. La edición inglesa de la Wikipedia muestra un mayor refrendo científico, a través de las referencias bibliográficas que se citan. El elevado número de consultas que se realizan en Wikipedia la dotan de un enorme potencial como herramientas para la trasmisión del conocimiento de las ciencias de la alimentación/nutrición. La edición española de la Wikipedia presenta mayor número de entradas y más adecuadas que las de la enciclopedia Mini Larousse.

Creating easy-to-read text is an issue that has traditionally been solved with manual work. But with advancing research in natural language processing, automatic systems for text simplification are being developed. These systems often need training data that is parallel aligned. For several years, simple Wikipedia has been the main source for this data. In the current study, several readability measures has been tested on a popular simplification corpus. A selection of guidelines from simple Wikipedia has also been operationalized and tested. The results imply that the following of guidelines are not greater in simple Wikipedia than in standard Wikipedia. There are however differences in the readability measures. The syntactical structures of simple Wikipedia seems to be less complex than those of standard Wikipedia. A continuation of this study would be to examine other readability measures and evaluate the guidelines not covered within the current work.

<p>This essay is about publishing on the Internet and aims to understand the differences between publishing information on the webpage Wikipedia (Swedish version) in contrast to other information pages on the Internet, for example blog, discussion pages, homepages etcetera. The study is based upon an article which described that 90% of the information publishers at Wikipedia belongs to a small elite of white, western, well educated men between the age of thirty to thirtythree. This study examines why people who does not belong to this heteronormativity publish information in other Internet places but not at Wikipedia.Wikipedia is an open source site, where anyone can publish and are even encouraged to do so and is often described as an utopian dream of the digital democracy, so why don´t people express themselves on Wikipedia? The method is based on two discussion groups, which are compared and analyzed. The study is based upon theoretical competence within feminist theory and conceptions such as intersectionality, heteronormativity and digital divide as well as theories about digital devices and social order. The analyses concluded that Wikipedias structure restrains people from contributing with information on the site, that is understand to be associated with true and objective information and prestige. It is also compared to the printed encyclopedia which also strengthens this understanding. And when people publish information in other coherences it is based upon their own understanding, and this requirement for true and objective information at Wikipedia hinder many.</p>

The main purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to examine how Swedish upper secondary school librarians and related staff relate to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The research is placed in the all-embracing context of information literacy and source criticism on the Internet. The study was carried out in the form of qualitative interviews and based on two theoretical bases: firstly, the concept of cognitive authority stipulated by Patrick Wilson, and secondly the idea that Wikipedia has a draw towards late modern epistemological assumptions. The latter theory was also associated with the perceptions of knowledge among the library staff interviewed. According to the results, there seems to be a connection between a) the library staff’s perceptions of knowledge, b) the library staff’s actual knowing about Wikipedia, c) the library staff’s attitudes toward Wikipedia and d) the teaching performed by the library staff about Wikipedia. The results also suggest the cognitive authority of the traditional encyclopaedia to be strong, especially among those within the library staff not very familiar with Wikipedia. Those positive to Wikipedia possibly represent perceptions of knowledge with a draw towards the late modern. Finally, possible solutions regarding the improvement of information literacy and of Wikipedia usage among the upper secondary school pupils are discussed.

This essay is about publishing on the Internet and aims to understand the differences between publishing information on the webpage Wikipedia (Swedish version) in contrast to other information pages on the Internet, for example blog, discussion pages, homepages etcetera. The study is based upon an article which described that 90% of the information publishers at Wikipedia belongs to a small elite of white, western, well educated men between the age of thirty to thirtythree. This study examines why people who does not belong to this heteronormativity publish information in other Internet places but not at Wikipedia.Wikipedia is an open source site, where anyone can publish and are even encouraged to do so and is often described as an utopian dream of the digital democracy, so why don´t people express themselves on Wikipedia? The method is based on two discussion groups, which are compared and analyzed. The study is based upon theoretical competence within feminist theory and conceptions such as intersectionality, heteronormativity and digital divide as well as theories about digital devices and social order. The analyses concluded that Wikipedias structure restrains people from contributing with information on the site, that is understand to be associated with true and objective information and prestige. It is also compared to the printed encyclopedia which also strengthens this understanding. And when people publish information in other coherences it is based upon their own understanding, and this requirement for true and objective information at Wikipedia hinder many.