There and Here

Mark Anderson, Leslie Carr, David E. Millard
2017 Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media - HT '17  
As large, collaboratively authored hypertexts such as Wikipedia grow so does the requirement both for organisational principles and methods to provide sustainable consistency and to ease the task of contributing editors. Large numbers of (potential) editors are not necessarily a su cient bulwark against loss of coherence amongst a corpus of many discrete articles. The longitudinal task of curation may bene t from deliberate curatorial roles and techniques. A potentially bene cial technique for
more » ... he development and maintenance of hypertext content at scale is hypertext transclusion, by o ering controllable re-use of a canonical source. In considering issues of longitudinal support of web collaborative hypertexts, we investigated the current degree and manner of adoption of transclusion facilities by editors of Wikipedia articles. We sampled 20 million articles from ten discrete language wikis within Wikipedia to analyse behaviour both within and across the individual Wikipedia communities. We show that Wikipedia (as at February 2016) makes limited, inconsistent of use of transclusion. Use is localised to subject areas, which di er between sampled languages. A limited number of patterns were observed including: Lists from transclusion, Lists of Lists, Episodic Media Listings, Tangles, Articles as Macros, and Self-Transclusion. We nd little indication of deliberate structural maintenance of the hypertext.
doi:10.1145/3078714.3078726 dblp:conf/ht/AndersonCM17 fatcat:7hp43hfsjjc2ndpykqwirlrfl4