Social Geography &Wikipedia

a quick overwiew

Maurizio Napolitano

(SoNet internal research meeting)

FBK 27/08/2010

SoNet Research Meetings

These slides were used for an internal presentation of the SoNet group.

Every week, one member of the SoNet group presents a research papers to the other members. The mentioned paper(s) are hence written by other researchers.

Being internal presentations, these slides might be a bit rough and unpolished.

You can find more information (including this presentation) about the SoNet group at http://sonet.fbk.eu

Summary

• Introduction: the wikification of GIS• Wikipedia and geodata

• Some research questions– You Are Where You Edit:

Locating Wikipedia Contributors Through Edit Histories

– Spatiotemporal Mapping of Wikipedia Concepts

Introduction

Introduction

Sui, D.Z. The wikification of GIS and its consequences: or Angelina Jolie's new tattoo and the future of GIS. Comp. Env. Urb. Sys. 2008, 32, 1-5.

The wikifications

• The GIS has changed– Better hardware → easy management– Data production → Crowdsourcing project

(WikiMapia, OpenStreetMap, Mapufacture,

GeoCommons, TierraWiki, FixMyStreet, WhoIsSick … ) and GeoTag

– People → Organizations

… NEOGEOGRAPHY ...

Wikipedia and geodata – applications (1/2)

• Space-time exploration

• Space-time selection• Space-Wikipedia

relationship exploration

• Space-Wikipedia relationship selection

Hecht, B.; Rohs, M.; Schöning, J.; and Krüger, A. 2007. WikEye - using magic lenses to explore georeferenced Wikipedia content. In Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices.

Wikipedia and geodata – applications (2/2)

Berlin article temporal reference profileSpatial feature-edge-feature relationships in Wikipedia

Wikipedia e geodata

Wikipedia geopages – the infobox

{{Infobox Settlement…|latd = 37 |latm = 18 |lats = 15 |latNS = N|longd = 121 |longm = 52 |longs = 22 |longEW = W…}}

You Are Where You Edit - Michael D. Lieberman - ICWSM 2009, San Jose, CA

Wikipedia geopages – problem and solution

Must process page Wiki markup to identify geographic templates and extract coordinates– Wiki markup language

continually evolves

– Geographic templates continually evolve

– Over 20 distinct template forms at this time for different coordinate systems and feature types

DBpedia– Public ontology derived

from Wikipedia, including extracted geographic coordinates

– Amounts to a primitive gazetteer of geographic entities in Wikipedia

Features With Extent

All geopages are tagged with a single lat/lon pointTradeoff between simplicity and accuracy

Examples: Country or state Center or capital city,Road Midpoint, River Source

Want to distinguish these features, as tagged point may be geographically distant from other contributor edits

In Wikipedia, more precise coordinates generally indicates smaller extentCalifornia: (37, -120)

San Jose, CA: (37.304, -121.873)

Some research questions

1. You Are Where You Edit2. Spatiotemporal Mapping of Wikipedia Concepts

You Are Where You Edit:Locating Wikipedia Contributors Through Edit

Histories

• Contributors tend to add what they know and self-organize into groups based on interest– Can contributors be further categorized based on their edits

to geographic pages? (= geopages)

• Identify Wikipedia contributors who:– Edit geopages in a constrained geographic area

– Mostly edit one or two “pet” geopages

– Identify reasons for the above patterns

You Are Where You Edit - Michael D. Lieberman - ICWSM 2009, San Jose, CA

Worked only on the english Wikipedia version8 Oct 2008 - 61.7GB of data.

Wikipedia/DBpedia dump statistics.Stat Type Class Total Geo Geo%

pages 14915993 328393 2.2%

contrib both 16235895 2011828 12.4%

anon 13795118 1655135 12.0%

named 2440777 356693 14,6%

edits both 224473397 15341937 6.8%

anon 55571407 4519807 8.1%

named both 168901990 10822130 6.4%

non minor 114844836 6357558 5.5%

minor 54057154 4464572 8.3%

A considerable number of pages (~330k) are tagged with geographic coordinates

Basic Observations

• Named contributors are outnumbered by anonymous ones by about 5 to 1, but are responsible for 2–3 times as many geopage edits

• A nontrivial number of named contributors have made at least one non-minor edit to a geopage (14.6%)

• Most edits to geopages are non-minor edits (58.7%)

Geopages Country distribution

• Vast majority of geopages tagged to the US and Europe

• Possibly reflects the geographic distribution of contributors to the English Wikipedia

You Are Where You Edit - Michael D. Lieberman - ICWSM 2009, San Jose, CA

CountryCountry CountCount

USA 83871

France 37730

UK 26651

Poland 16050

Germany 15939

Russia 10964

Canada 8970

Italy 8772

Spain 6603

India 5683

Wikipedia geocoverage - en.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia Edit Histories

• Easily-parsed XML format• Information saved for each edit:

– Username (or IP address, if anonymous)

– Timestamp

– Whether edit is “minor” (spelling, formatting)

• Excluded anonymous edits– Not allowed to be marked minor, to avoid abuse

– Most Wikipedia vandalism perpetrated anonymously

• Also excluded minor edits– Geopages tend to have mostly non-minor edits

Sample Edit Patterns

Indentify edit area contributors

Of 356693 contributors with at least one edit to a geopage,

only 102271 (28.7%) have user pages. Also, for the 93195

contributors with at least five edits to geopages, only 47623

(51.1%) have user pages.

•Large number of edits to geopages•Geopage edits constrained to a small area•At least K edited geopages•Area α of convex hull of edited geopage coordinates smaller than A (edit area)

K = 3 and - A = 1 deg2 ≈ 112 x 112 km

Accounting For Outliers

• Local edit patterns may be muddled by “outlier” edits

• For each contributor, select a fraction F of edited geopages with smallest convex hull area

• Simple approximation scheme:

1. For each geopage P:

a. Sort edited geopages by distance from P

b. Compute convex hull HP of first F geopages

2. Select HP with smallest area α

• Example: 71 deg2 - 10 deg2

(5k x 5k mi - 112 x 112km)

Contributor Locality

Computed minimum edit area sizes forF = {95%, 80%}, both(a) with and (b) without features with extent

30–35% of contributors have edit areas smaller than 1 deg2

Over 50% of contributors with less than 5 geopage edits are highly local

Pet Geopages

• Statistics for users with:

– 5–20 edits (~93k)

– over 20 edits (~28k)

• Over 50% of contributors with 5–20 edits, and 25% of contributors with over 20 edits, have over 80% of geopage edits confined to two geopages

Reasons for Tight Edit Areas

Randomly selected 100 contributors with at least 10 edits to geopages and small edit areas

• Concurrently examined contributors’ user pages and the set of edited geopages to determine an interest

• Contributors with small edit areas tend to be born in or are living in the region defined by their edit areas

Some research questions

1. You Are Where You Edit2. Spatiotemporal Mapping of Wikipedia Concepts

The question“Where” and “when” are important implicit aspects of a wide variety of concepts.

Wikipedia offer:

–. Geopages

–. Biography (birth and death dates)

–. Temporal and spatial information concerning concepts (Romanticism, Scholasticism)

HOW ASSOCIATE THIS INFORMATION?

By using common wiki pages in this languages:English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese.

The solution start by using dbpedia

Results about spatiotemporal mapping of Wikipedia concepts

Topics explorerd:1.Concepts and geolocation2.Biography and country3.Cultural interaction between countries4.Historical periods of literature and philosophy

and related countries

Country rappresented in Wikipedia geopages

Distribution of geotagged articles in different countries (log2 values are plotted).

Top 20 cities (geotagged)14.000 total

Top 20 cities by number of geotagged articles.

People by century

Distribution of Wikipedia person articles per century of lifespan. Log2 values are shown. The total number of century-people associations is higher than 423,846 because many persons are associated with 2 centuries

Biography and countries

Distribution of Wikipedia biographies by nationality

Distribution of Wikipedia biographies by occupation

Cultural interactions

Top 5 source (incoming) and destinations (outgoing) of cultural interactions for 10 countries.Statistics computer from the study of locations associated to persons present in Wikipedia.The size of displayed countris is proportional to the log2 of the contry's score.

Top 5 cities and countries in philosophy for different periods

Top 5 cities and countries in philosophy for different periods. Starting with the 1st century, five century slots were used.

Top 5 cities and countries in literature from the 15th century to nowadays.

One century time slots were usede

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All the images come from the relative papers

Bibliography

Sui, D.Z. The wikification of GIS and its consequences: or Angelina Jolie's new tattoo and the future of GIS. Comp. Env. Urb. Sys. 2008, 32, 1-5.

http://geog.tamu.edu/~sui/publication/pub2008/SuiCEUSeditorial.pdf

Hecht, B.; Rohs, M.; Schöning, J.; and Krüger, A. 2007. WikEye - using magic lenses to explore georeferenced Wikipedia content. In Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices

http://www.deutsche-telekom-laboratories.de/~rohs/papers/Hecht-WikEye.pdf

Michael D. Lieberman You Are Where You Edit ICWSM 2009, San Jose, CAhttp://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Lieberman_Lin_ICWSM2009.pdf

Adrian's analysis of Wikipedia: Adrian Popescu, Gregory Grefenstette Spatiotemporal Mapping of Wikipedia Concepts, JCDL 2010, June 21 - 25, Brisbane, Australia

http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1816142&type=pdf