Wikipedia administrators are vital to the project’s success, performing over a million administrative actions annually. This multi-method study systematically analyzes adminship across 284 Wikipedia languages since 2018, revealing a critical two-sided trend: while over half of all Wikipedias show a net increase in administrators, almost two-thirds of highly active Wikipedias face decline. Our analysis, drawing from large-scale adminship log analysis, over 3000 surveys, and 12 interviews, reveals this decline is primarily driven by insufficient recruitment, not unusual attrition. We identify key barriers for potential administrators: limited awareness, ambiguous requirements, a demanding selection process, and low initial interest. Recognizing that current administrators remain highly motivated and engaged, we propose actionable recommendations to strengthen recruitment pipelines and fuel Wikipedia administrator growth, crucial for Wikipedia’s long-term sustainability.

Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They are used by editors to create a structure for the content of articles, which in turn improves reading and editing workflows. Today, millions of carefully curated section titles exist in more than 160 actively edited Wikipedia languages as standalone components of a larger system. Understanding the connection and correspondence of section titles across languages presents various application opportunities such as article template recommendation, i.e., given a source language article, we can generate a skeleton of section titles for a target language. Inspired by this real-world data mining problem, the present paper introduces the problem of aligning section titles across Wikipedia languages and proposes a probabilistic method for identifying such correspondences. Instead of applying translation tools to section titles (which may generate out-of lexicon titles), we develop a supervised model that identifies cross-language mappings based on section content features. We collected a ground-truth dataset created for this purpose with the help of volunteers. In addition, we use Probabilistic Soft Logic to model the dependencies between multilingual section pairings. We show that our approach performs better than machine translation solutions in about 80% of the language pairs, including distant language mappings such as Arabic to Russian or French to Japanese and in many of the more closely related languages such as French to Spanish.

As one of the Web's primary multilingual knowledge sources, Wikipedia is read by millions of people across the globe every day. Despite this global readership, little is known about why users read Wikipedia's various language editions. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comparative study by combining a large-scale survey of Wikipedia readers across 14 language editions with a log-based analysis of user activity. We proceed in three steps. First, we analyze the survey results to compare the prevalence of Wikipedia use cases across languages, discovering commonalities, but also substantial differences, among Wikipedia languages with respect to their usage. Second, we match survey responses to the respondents' traces in Wikipedia's server logs to characterize behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases, finding that distinctive patterns consistently mark certain use cases across language editions. Third, we show that certain Wikipedia use cases are more common in countries with certain socio-economic characteristics; e.g., in-depth reading of Wikipedia articles is substantially more common in countries with a low Human Development Index. These findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behaviors across Wikipedia languages and have implications for Wikipedia editors and developers of Wikipedia and other Web technologies.

Sections are the building blocks of Wikipedia articles. They enhance readability and can be used as a structured entry point for creating and expanding articles. Structuring a new or already existing Wikipedia article with sections is a hard task for humans, especially for newcomers or less experienced editors, as it requires significant knowledge about how a well-written article looks for each possible topic. Inspired by this need, the present paper defines the problem of section recommendation for Wikipedia articles and proposes several approaches for tackling it. Our systems can help editors by recommending what sections to add to already existing or newly created Wikipedia articles. Our basic paradigm is to generate recommendations by sourcing sections from articles that are similar to the input article. We explore several ways of defining similarity for this purpose (based on topic modeling, collaborative filtering, and Wikipedia's category system). We use both automatic and human evaluation approaches for assessing the performance of our recommendation system, concluding that the category-based approach works best, achieving [email protected] of about 80% in the human evaluation.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions, capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000 responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs, enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as recommendation engines.

Good websites should be easy to navigate via hyperlinks, yet maintaining a high-quality link structure is difficult. Identifying pairs of pages that should be linked may be hard for human editors, especially if the site is large and changes frequently. Further, given a set of useful link candidates, the task of incorporating them into the site can be expensive, since it typically involves humans editing pages. In the light of these challenges, it is desirable to develop data-driven methods for automating the link placement task. Here we develop an approach for automatically finding useful hyperlinks to add to a website. We show that passively collected server logs, beyond telling us which existing links are useful, also contain implicit signals indicating which nonexistent links would be useful if they were to be introduced. We leverage these signals to model the future usefulness of yet nonexistent links. Based on our model, we define the problem of link placement under budget constraints and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on Wikipedia, a large website for which we have access to both server logs (used for finding useful new links) and the complete revision history (containing a ground truth of new links). As our method is based exclusively on standard server logs, it may also be applied to any other website, as we show with the example of the biomedical research site Simtk.

The different Wikipedia language editions vary dramatically in how comprehensive they are. As a result, most language editions contain only a small fraction of the sum of information that exists across all Wikipedias. In this paper, we present an approach to filling gaps in article coverage across different Wikipedia editions. Our main contribution is an end-to-end system for recommending articles for creation that exist in one language but are missing in another. The system involves identifying missing articles, ranking the missing articles according to their importance, and recommending important missing articles to editors based on their interests. We empirically validate our models in a controlled experiment involving 12,000 French Wikipedia editors. We find that personalizing recommendations increases editor engagement by a factor of two. Moreover, recommending articles increases their chance of being created by a factor of 3.2. Finally, articles created as a result of our recommendations are of comparable quality to organically created articles. Overall, our system leads to more engaged editors and faster growth of Wikipedia with no effect on its quality.

An optimization method based on column generation decomposition is described and demonstrated for the redundancy allocation problem to maximize system reliability. The redundancy allocation problem is a well-known nonlinear integer programming problem, which involves the maximization of system reliability by selecting components and redundancy levels as part of engineering design. The proposed solution method is based on the formulation of a restricted master problem and generation of possible better solutions through a set of sub-problems. The main advantages of our approach over previously studied heuristic methods are that it considers the objective function directly without any approximations, it has superior computation time, and it is flexible. Flexibility means that there is no need for assumptions like convexity and linearity of the objective function or constraints, restrictions on the number of constraints, and restrictions on component mixing. However, it is necessary to assume that the objective function and constraints are separable in decision variables. Numerical results are presented and discussed based on previously studied examples. The overall quality of the solutions matches or surpasses most of the existing heuristic methods with less computation time in the majority of the presented cases.

Change management is viewed as one of the most important processes in IT management with the main challenge of scheduling the change requests. That is, given a set of change requests for different parts of an IT system, how one should schedule changes to minimize the costs and risks of service delivery. In this paper, we approach the change request scheduling problem using a simple optimization model and consider both deterministic and stochastic cases. We show that these models can be converted to the Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework for which promising solution techniques exist. We conclude the work with an illustrative example as an instance of our model.