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Submissions/Woogle4MediaWiki - An Extension to improve Search and Guide Contributions

From Wikimania 2011 • Haifa, Israel

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Review no.

143

Title of the submission

Woogle4MediaWiki - An Extension to improve Search and Guide Contributions

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Hans-Jörg Happel

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

User:hhappel

Country of origin

Germany

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

FZI Reseach Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany

Personal homepage or blog

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Woogle4MediaWiki

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wiki users are often confused about what (and why) to contribute to a Wiki. This stems from the open and collaborative nature of Wikis, which do not assign formal "responsibility" to certain editors, but allow any user to improve any content.

To this end, "wanted pages" (also called "red links") can be considered a fundamental innovation of Wiki technology. While links to non-existing content is considered a (404-not-found) error in the plain Web, Wikis consider them as demands or votes for a particular kind of content. However, the vast amount of contribution opportunities makes it also hard to find out for authors which contribution would bring the most value for the Wiki.

To improve these issues we developed Woogle4MediaWiki, an extension for MediaWiki, which gives authors better information about how to allocate their contributions. In particular, Woogle4MediaWiki complements "red links" to non-existing pages with a JavaScript popup, providing information about the number of links to this page, and to prior search queries containing the page title.

Some of this information is gathered through Woogle's search capabilities, which replace MediaWiki's built in search. Interestingly, search is the only feature in MediaWiki which does not allow users to collaborate. Woogle4MediaWiki changes this by a) making every search query a Wiki page with a small article and discussion space and b) by allowing users to add, remove and re-rank search results.

While our extension was primarily designed for usage in smaller Enterprise Wikis, we think that smaller language versions of Wikipedia might benefit from its features as well. We would like to discuss such opportunities as well as feature suggestions and future development plans with the community.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

Infrastructure

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

not sure

Slides or further information (optional)


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  1. Jaime Penagos 15:21, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Ruslik 09:02, 25 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Krinkle 10:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]