Citation counts are according to Google Scholar as of March 2012.
Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl. “Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia”. In Proc. GROUP 2007.
Wikipedia’s brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing. Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings.
Reid Priedhorsky, Benjamin Jordan, Loren Terveen. “How a personalized geowiki can help bicyclists share information more effectively”. Short paper. In Proc. WikiSym 2007.
The bicycling community is focused around a real-world activity — navigating a bicycle — which requires planning within a complex and ever-changing space. While all the knowledge needed to find good routes exists, it is highly distributed. We show, using the results of surveys and interviews, that cyclists need a comprehensive, up-to-date, and personalized information resource. We introduce the personalized geowiki, a new type of wiki which meets these requirements, and we formalize the notion of geowiki. Finally, we state some general prerequisites for wiki contribution and show that they are met by cyclists.
Reid Priedhorsky and Loren Terveen. “The computational geowiki: What, why, and how”. In Proc. CSCW 2008.
Google Maps and its spin-offs are highly successful, but they have a major limitation: users see only pictures of geographic data. These data are inaccessible except by limited vendor-defined APIs, and associated user data are weakly linked to them. But some applications require access, specifically geowikis and computational geowikis. We present the design and implementation of a computational geowiki. We also show empirically that both geowiki and computational geowiki features are necessary for a representative domain, bicycling, because (a) cyclists have useful knowledge unavailable except from cyclists and (b) cyclist-oriented automatic route-finding is enhanced by user input. Finally, we derive design implications: for example, user contributions presented within a route description are useful, and wikis should support contribution of opinion as well as fact.
Reid Priedhorsky, Mikhil Masli, and Loren Terveen. “Eliciting and focusing geographic volunteer work”. In Proc. CSCW 2010.
Open content communities such as wikis derive their value from the work done by users. However, a key challenge is to elicit work that is sufficient and focused where needed. We address this challenge in a geographic open content community, the Cyclopath bicycle route finding system. We devised two techniques to elicit and focus user work, one using familiarity to direct work opportunities and another visually highlighting them. We conducted a field experiment, finding that (a) the techniques succeeded in eliciting user work, (b) the distribution of work across users was highly unequal, and (c) user work benefitted the community (reducing the length of the average computed route by 1 kilometer).
Reid Priedhorsky and Loren Terveen. “Wiki grows up: Arbitrary data models, access control, and beyond”. In Proc. WikiSym 2011.
Ward Cunningham’s vision for the wiki was that it would be “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. We consider here a common manifestation of simplicity: the assumption that the objects in a wiki that can be edited (e.g., Wikipedia articles) are relatively independent. As wiki applications in new domains emerge, however, this assumption is no longer tenable. In wikis where the objects of interest are highly interdependent (e.g., geographic wikis), fundamental concepts like the revision and undoing must be refined. This is particularly so when fine-grained access control is required (as in enterprise wikis or wikis to support collaboration between citizens and government officials). We explore these issues in the context of the Cyclopath geowiki and present solutions that we have designed and have implemented or are implementing.
Reid Priedhorsky, David Pitchford, Shilad Sen, and Loren Terveen. “Recommending routes in the context of bicycling: Algorithms, evaluation, and the value of personalization”. In Proc. CSCW 2012.
Users have come to rely on automated route finding services for driving, public transit, walking, and bicycling. Current state of the art route finding algorithms typically rely on objective factors like time and distance; they do not consider subjective preferences that also influence route quality. This paper addresses that need. We introduce a new framework for evaluating edge rating prediction techniques in transportation networks and use it to explore ten families of prediction algorithms in Cyclopath, a geographic wiki that provides route finding services for bicyclists. Overall, we find that personalized algorithms predict more accurately than nonpersonalized ones, and we identify two algorithms with low error and excellent coverage, one of which is simple enough to be implemented in thin clients like web browsers. These results suggest that routing systems can generate better routes by collecting and analyzing users’ subjective preferences.
Pam Ludford, Reid Priedhorsky, Ken Reily, Loren Terveen. “Capturing, sharing, and using local place information”. In Proc. CHI 2007.
Michael Ludwig, Reid Priedhorsky, and Loren Terveen. “Path selection: A novel interaction technique for mapping applications”. In Proc. CHI 2009.
Katherine Panciera, Reid Priedhorsky, Tom Erickson, and Loren Terveen. “Lurking? Cyclopaths? A quantitative lifecycle analysis of user behavior in a geowiki”. In Proc. CHI 2010.
Fernando Torre, S. Andrew Sheppard, Reid Priedhorsky, Loren Terveen. “bumpy, caution with merging: An exploration of tagging in a geowiki”. In Proc. GROUP 2010.
Mikhil Masli, Reid Priedhorsky, Loren Terveen. “Task specialization in social production communities: The case of geographic volunteer work”. In Proc. ICWSM 2011.