About - Chsmpswy

About the WikiPlayer

Background

We have developed a wiki-based platform , called the WikiDesignPlatform (WDP), which couples (as required) additional components (e.g. email, instant messenger, CVS repository) with the traditional wiki and automatically produces detailed transcripts of all the online activity by the users, far richer that the average "recent changes" history provided by most wikis.

When a wiki is used, for example, by teams of software engineers to manage their paperwork the size of the dataset can grow rapidly. An example dataset we have collected from only a two month in-class experiment with ten students included 982 revisions (only counting edit events) of 242 wikipages, totaling 5MB of raw text. Mining such a vast set of wiki data is challenging and difficult if one does not have the right tools at their disposal to support the analysis work.

The WikiPlayer reads the transcripts produced by the WDP and enables the analyst to replay these transcripts in a manner that makes it easier to investigate the ebb and flow of online work. The WikiPlayer produces a narrative of online work, provides a visualization of the activity timeline that can be used to access specific intervals of events in the wiki history, and view a selection of pages side-by-side as they evolve. The capability to search allows the analyst to look for certain kinds of content. The WikiPlayer enables one to track both the reading and editing behavior on a single wiki page or by a single contributor. It also enables a detailed analysis of the interaction among contributors to a wiki site or the evolution and propagation of representations.

Using the WikiPlayer to "replay" and analyze the wiki-based collaboration

The WikiPlayer reads the transcripts produced by the WDP.

The WikiPlayer includes a set of components that provide flexibility to the analyst when interacting with the history so that navigation and data mining of the vast record of the collaborative activity is fast and efficient. For example, the analyst can initially view the collaboration at a higher-level, find a set of events of interest, and then dig deep into the activity to examine the interaction among the contributors and how it manifested itself in terms of their online representational work.

The WikiPlayer enables the analyst to do “on-the-fly” interaction with the data, filtering, searching and spontaneous exploration of the evolution of individual pages and the wiki site as a whole.

It is possible to write plugins that add a specific set of features or services to the player. The plugins can be seamlessly integrated using access points and methods provided by the WikiPlayer Plugin Application Program Interface (API).

attachment:wikiplayer.png

Some core components of the player include:

EventTimeline: Represents edit and read events as bubbles on a scatter plot over time. A bubble’s coordinate (x,y) consists of a timestamp (x) and wikipage name (y). Using the mouse the analyst can interact with the data and filter out wikipages, selection of users, selecte pages or revisions for "difference comparison", or force the player to "jump" to a particular event in the history for further analysis.
WikiPlayerDisplay: Is a checkerboard-style window where each square represents a wiki page. If a user edits a page the related “square” on the display will be shaded with his/her color or if the user reads a page a colored border will surround it. During playback the document content changes are displayed on their respective squares and all other documents that were not modified retain their appearance from the previous timestep.
WikiNarrative: Produces narratives of the wiki work. During playback, as each event is “replayed”, a narrative text describing that event is added to the narrative window. The narrative for the current event is also displayed on the timeline with an arrow pointing to the (x,y) bubble on the scatter plot that represents the event.
The controller: Mediates the “playback” of the revision history. It contains “VCR style” controls that can be used to replay the revision history. Once the history has been loaded it is possible to play it forward/backwards, stop, step forward or backwards, and fast forward/backwards. The slider allows the analyst to quickly position the player at a specific timestep in the history.
PageTracker: Its interface is split into two parts. The upper part allows the analyst to select pages and “pin” them to the window. That helps the analyst keep track of a single page or a few pages of interest. The bottom half of the tracker window contains 5 boxes representing the 5 most recent events. The most recent/current event is shown on the far right box (event at time t). The box to its immediate left is the previous event (at time t-1) and so on.
Notepad: The analyst can make notes right in the WikiPlayer which will be saved in the project file and thus later retrievable when the project is opened again for further analysis.