Michael Hauben, Ronda Hauben: Netizens: On The History And Impact Of Usenet And The Internet (1996)

Netizens, one of the first books detailing the Internet, looks at the creation and development of this participatory global computer network. The authors conducted online research to find out what makes the Internet “tick”. This research results in an informative examination of the pioneering vision and actions that have helped make the Net possible. The book is a detailed description of the Net’s construction and a step-by-step view of the past, present, and future of the Internet, the Usenet and the WWW.

The book gives you the needed perspective to understand how the Net can impact the present and the turbulent future. These questions are answered: What is the vision that inspired or guided these people at each step? What was the technical or social problem or need that they were trying to solve? What can be done to help nourish the future extension and development of the Net? How can the Net be made available to a broader set of people?

With foreword by Tom Truscott
A print edition was published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, later distributed by John Wiley
ISBN 0-8186-7706-6

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Jose Felipe Ortega Sotó: Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis (2009)

This doctoral thesis offers a quantitative analysis of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. The main goal has been to trace the evolution in time of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. The analysis is focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate in the project). The comparative study encompasses general evolution parameters, a detailed analysis of the inner social structure and stratification of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, a study of the inequality level of contributions (among authors and articles), a demographic study of the Wikipedia community and some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and the trustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with the study of the influence of the main findings presented in this thesis for the future sustainability of Wikipedia in the following years.

The analysis of the inequality level of contributions over time, and the evolution of additional key features identified in this thesis, reveals an untenable trend towards progressive increase of the effort spent by the most active authors, as time passes by. This trend may eventually cause that these authors will reach their upper limit in the number of revisions they can perform each month, thus starting a decreasing trend in the number of monthly revisions, and an overall recession of the content creation and reviewing process in Wikipedia. Finally, another important contribution for the research community is WikiXRay, the software tool we have developed to perform the statistical analyses included in this thesis. This tool completely automates the process of retrieving the database dumps from the Wikimedia public repositories, massaging it to obtain key metrics and descriptive parameters, and loading them in a local database, ready to be used in empirical analyses.

As far as we know, this is the first research work implementing a comparative analysis, from an quantitative point of view, of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, presenting complementary results from different research perspectives. Therefore, we expect that this contribution will help the scientific community to enhance their understanding of the rich, complex and fascinating working mechanisms and behavioral patterns of the Wikipedia project and its community of authors. Likewise, we hope that WikiXRay will facilitate the hard task of developing empirical analyses on any language version of the encyclopaedia, boosting in this way the number of comparative studies like this one in many other scientific disciplines.

Doctoral Thesis
Ingeniero de Telecomunicación
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria de Telecomunicación, Madrid, 2009
Supervisor: Jesús M. González Barahona
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License

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Piotr Czerski: We, the Web Kids (2012) [PL/EN/ES/DE/FR/EE/CZ/SE/RS/MK/CN/IT/RU]

Originally published on 11 February 2012 in the Polish paper Dziennik Bałtycki under the title My, dzieci sieci.
Creative Commons License BY-SA 3.0 Unported

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