WiGipedia: A Tool for Improving Structured Data in Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia is emerging as the dominant global knowledge repository. Recently, large numbers of users have collaborated to produce more structured information in the so called "info boxes''. However, editing this data requires even more care than editing standard wikitext, as one must follow arcane template syntax. This paper describes WiGipedia, a novel tool which provides an alternative to the traditional approach, by supporting editing of structured wiki data through two intuitive and interactive interfaces, facilitating user input on both tabular and graph-based representations of structured data. The tool allows users to identify and correct inconsistencies that are otherwise hidden across multiple articles. Furthermore, a novel recommendation algorithm is applied to assist users in their contribution to the wiki. The paper discusses design, implementation details, and results of a usability study in which the system compares significantly well against the traditional approach to editing Wikipedia infoboxes.