Document Type

Dissertation

Rights

This item is available under a Creative Commons License for non-commercial use only

Publication Details

Dissertation submitted for the award of MSc in Computing (Knowledge Management), 2008.

Abstract

Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopaedia, in which articles are created together by anyone who is willing to contribute. There is debate on the quality, reliability and consistency of articles due to its openness. Besides, it is hard to see the growing path of articles because there is no centralised control in Wikipedia. The history of articles is available but in form that is difficult to process to get a picture of article evolution. Knowledge visualisation addresses the problem by providing analysis and comprehension of large amounts of data to gain insights and to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing. However, currently there is no research focusing on visualising the content change for Wikipedia articles. This project is to investigate the usefulness of a visual representation of article history as a tool for Wikipedia users and the usefulness of this representation as a tool to improve knowledge creation and sharing in Wikipedia. By utilising several data retrieving, parsing and visualising tools, the project builds the visual representations of Knowledge Management article on Wikipedia based on the word count and contribution metrics. It is found that the dynamic visualisation is useful in tracking the evolution of article and is helpful for gaining better understanding of the topic after seeing the evolution of its article on Wikipedia.

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