A Utility for Estimating the Relative Contributions of Wiki Authors

Abstract

Wikis were originally designed to hide the association between a wiki page and the authors who have produced it. However, there is evidence suggesting that corporate wiki users require an attribution mechanism that would automatically record (and present) the relative contribution of each author. In this paper we introduce an algorithm for assessing the contributions of wiki authors that is based on the notion of sentence ownership. The results of an empirical evaluation comparing the algorithm’s output to manual evaluations reveal the type of contributions captured by our algorithm. Implications for research and practice are discussed.