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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The Design and Analysis of Open Content Communities
The internet has enabled a new class of applications where users -- rather than designers or owners or managers - produce much of the value of the application. Social filtering systems -- as pioneered by sites like MovieLens and popularized in sites like Amazon.com -- took one step on this path. While site owners are responsible for entering the items of interest (movies, books, etc.), users add value by entering ratings, tags, reviews, etc. Other systems like wikis and open source software take user creation of content to a radical extreme: users produce all content. This idea might seem unlikely to work, but the success of systems like Wikipedia and Linux is proof to the contrary. I will report on several research projects that explore key issues in communities where users create content:
My collaborators and I have investigated these issues in Wikipedia, the MovieLens film recommender community, and the Cyclopath geowiki for bicyclists.
