Matthijs den Besten

Open science in e‐science: contingency or policy?

Purpose – This paper seeks to discuss the question of “openness” in e‐Science.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on 12 in‐depth interviews with principal investigators, project managers and developers involved in UK e‐Science projects, together with supporting documentary evidence from project web sites. The approach was to explore the juxtaposition of research governance at the institutional level and local research practices at the project level. Interview questions focused on research inputs, software development processes, access to resources, project documentation, dissemination of outputs and by‐products, licensing issues, and institutional contracts.Findings – The findings suggest that, although there is a widely shared ethos of openness in everyday research practice, there are many uncertainties and yet‐to‐be resolved issues, despite strong policy imperatives towards openly shared resources.Research limitations/implications – The paper concludes by observing a stratification of openn...

Keep it Simple: A Companion for Simple Wikipedia?

In this paper, we inquire about some of the ways in which the community around Simple Wikipedia—an offspring of Wikipedia, the notorious free online encyclopedia—manages the online collaborative production of reliable knowledge. We focus on how it keeps its collection of articles “simple” and easy to read. We find that the labeling of pages as “unsimple” by core members of the community plays a significant but seemingly insufficient role. We suggest that the nature of this mode of decentralized knowledge production and the structure of Wiki‐technology might call for the implementation of an editorial companion to the community.

Different Bug Fixing Regimes? A Preliminary Case for Superbugs

The paper investigates the processes by which bugs are fixed in open-source software projects. Focusing on Mozilla and combining data from both its bug tracker (Bugzilla) and from its CVS, we suggest that: a) Some bugs resist beyond the first patch applied to the main branch of the source code in relation to them, which we denote as superbugs; b) There might exist different bug fixing regimes; c) priority and severity flags as defined in bug repositories are not optimized for superbugs and might lead to a involuntary side effects; d) The survival time of superbugs is influenced by the nature of the discussions within Bugzilla, by bug dependencies and by the provision of contextual elements.

Channeling Firefox Developers: Mom and Dad Aren't Happy Yet

Firefox, a browser targeted at mainstream users, has been one of the big successes of open source development in recent years. That Firefox succeeded where earlier attempts failed is undoubtedly due to the particular choices that were made in the process of development. In this paper, we look at this process in more detail. Mining bug reports and feature requests related to Firefox in Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracker system, we find that the attention developers devoted to reports and requests was influenced by several factors. Most importantly, other things being equal, reports and requests from outsiders increasingly tend to be ignored. While such behavior may have helped to shield Firefox from the “alpha-geek power user” in the early stages of development, it also makes it difficult for “mom and dad” to let their voice be heard even after they have adopted Firefox.

LITERARY SLEUTHS ONLINE: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki

This paper analyzes a Wiki which has been developed for annotating the novel Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon in terms of how it functions as a tool for online research collaboration. The annotation of this long and complex work of fiction has taken place in a very short time, with many contributors and great depth of coverage. We compare this Wiki with an earlier single-authored annotation in book form of a similar novel by the same author. This allows a comparison of technology-mediated distributed collaborative annotation and conventional annotation by a single author in book form. A comparison is made between the kinds of entries made and the patterns of contributions and the strengths and weaknesses of both processes of annotation are analysed. The functions of this Wiki as a tool for supporting the interpretation of the novel and a means of engagement with a notoriously reclusive author are also discussed. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of this voluntary, amateur and low-tech type of online collaboration are assessed.

Peeling the Onion

According to the now widely accepted onion-model of the organization of open source software development, an open source project typically relies on a core of developers that is assisted by a larger periphery of users. But what does the role of the periphery consist of? Raymonds Linuss Law which states that given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow suggests at least one important function: the detection of defects. Yet, what are the ways through which core and periphery interact with each other? With the help of text-mining methods, we study the treatment of bugs that affected the Firefox Internet browser as reflected in the discussions and actions recorded in Mozillas issue tracking system Bugzilla. We find various patterns in the modes of interactions between core and peripheral members of the community. For instance, core members seem to engage more frequently with the periphery when the latter proposes a solution (a patch). This leads us to conclude that Alan Coxs dictum show me the code, perhaps even more than Linuss law, seems to be the dominant rule that governs the development of software like Firefox.

Wikibugs: using template messages in open content collections

In the paper we investigate an organizational practice meant to increase the quality of commons-based peer production: the use of template messages in wiki-collections to highlight editorial bugs and call for intervention. In the context of SimpleWiki, an online encyclopedia of the Wikipedia family, we focus on {complex}, a template which is used to flag articles disregarding the overall goals of simplicity and readability. We characterize how this template is placed on and removed from articles and we use survival analysis to study the emergence and successful treatment of these bugs in the collection.

Mining for Practices in Community Collections: Finds From Simple Wikipedia

The challenges of commons based peer production are usually associated with the development of complex software projects such as Linux and Apache. But the case of open content production should not be treated as a trivial one. For instance, while the task of maintaining a collection of encyclopedic articles might seem negligible compared to the one of keeping together a software system with its many modules and interdependencies, it still poses quite demanding problems. In this paper, we describe the methods and practices adopted by Simple Wikipedia to keep its articles easy to read. Based on measurements of article readability and similarity, we conclude that while the mechanisms adopted by the community had some effect, in the long run more efforts and new practices might be necessary in order to maintain an acceptable level of readability in the Simple Wikipedia collection.

Will e-Science Be Open Science?

Much that has been written about e-research is occupied with the engineering and application of an enhanced technological infrastructure for the transmission, processing and storing of digital data and information. This chapter steps back to consider different, nontechnological requirements for attaining the ostensible goal of network-enabled research -augmenting the scale and effectiveness of global collaboration in scientific research.

Wikipedia as a Distributed Problem-Solving Network

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia put together by volunteers, is a prime example of a distributed problem-solving network with a global array of contributors creating a resource that has been compared to leading encyclopedia. The study focused on efforts to maintain the quality of Wikipedia entries and in particular of the use of tagging to signal the need for improvement in entries of Simple Wikipedia.