Tramullas J., Garrido-Picazo, P y Sánchez-Casabón, A.I. "Research on Wikipedia Vandalism: a brief literature review". 4th Spanish Conference in Information Retrieval CERI 2016. ACM. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2934732.2934748.

1. Research on
Wikipedia
Vandalism: a
brief literature
review
Jesús Tramullas
Library & Information Science Deparment,
University of Zaragoza
tramullas@unizar.es
Piedad Garrido
Computer Science & Systems Engineering
Department, University of Zaragoza
Ana I. Sánchez-Casabón
Library & Information Science Deparment,
University of Zaragoza

2. Systematic reviews on Wikipedia
studies
 Some reviews have been done in the last
years.
 Results had been used for:
 Define and distinguish Wikipedia as a subject
of social, scientific and technical research.
 Identify relevant topics or areas of research
within Wikipedia.

3. Vandalism in Wikipedia
 In different lierature reviews, it is one of the
topics, related to quality content.
 Wikipedia, itself, defines vandalism as “...any
addition, removal, or change of content, in a
deliberate attempt to damage Wikipedia.”

4. Objective and research questions, 1
 The objective is to develop a systematic
review of the academic literature published in
vandalism on Wikipedia.

5. Four research questions:
 RQ1: identify the relevant areas of knowledge in the subject.
 RQ2: development over time of the publications number.
 RQ3: research purposes proposed in the works.
 RQ4: methods and techniques used by researchers.
Objective and research questions, 2

6. Method
 The method, used in this paper, was a
systematic review of the bibliography, which
was applied to the literature about Wikipedia
by Okoli and Schabram (2009).
 The review applied in this paper belongs to
the category of stand-alone literature review.
 Its purpose is to systematically analyse the
literature on the subject, without the use of
primary data.

7. Protocol
 Bibliographic Search in: Web of Science,
Scopus and ACM DL databases.
 Processing of results to remove duplicates,
revise errors, and filter no relevant documents.
 Qualitative review of every selected reference.
 Publishing all data, in open access, for other
researchers or new works.

8. Results, 1
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
1
5
2
15
11
10
11
5
7
Computer Science 76%Hum&Social Sciences 10%Biomedical Sci. 3%
CS& SocSci 4%
CS&Education 4%
CS&InforSystems 1%
2. Authorship by Research Area
1. Publications per Year

9. Results, 2
Detection 60%
Qualitity Content 12%
Textual Analysis 6%
Prevention 3%
Information Behavior 3%
Others 16%
Machine Learning Classification 51%
Cuantitative Methods 9%
Reputation Analysis 9%
Simulation 6%
Qualitative Approach
Others 15%
4. Technical Approaches
3. Research Objectives

10. Discussion, 1
 RQ1: prevalence of computer science in the
study of vandalism on Wikipedia. (75% of the
papers; humanities and social sciences 15%).
 RQ2: attention to vandalism on Wikipedia is
low. It does not appear to be a priority area of
research.

11. Discussion, 2
 RQ3: Main objective of the published papers is the
detection of vandalism, and the improvement of the
efficiency and effectiveness of the methods used.
Other goals are of secondary importance, with a low
number of papers.
 RQ4: Most methods used are classifiers, in machine
learning processes, for the detection of acts of
vandalism, against a previously established corpus.

12. Conclusion and future work, 1
 Research into vandalism is not a Wikipedia
research hot spot.
 Main objective has been to develop methods
that enable the automatic detection of
vandalism.
 Research lacks a sufficient number of studies
on informational behaviour of vandals.

13. Conclusion and future work, 2
 Research needs to be carry out from an integrated
perspective, that combines computational methods
with the sociotechnical research:
Wikipedia is a community with principles and
unwritten social rules that should be taken
into account when studying it.