Diversity-minded information management in Wikipedia

Objective: Since its inauguration Wikipedia has evolved to become the largest online encyclopedia and is almost the default address for online references. Wikipedia includes more than 26 million articles published in more than 250 languages that are maintained by some 100’000 volunteer editors that are supported by hundreds of millions of editing “Wikipedians” around the world. Together with the German branch of the non-profit organization Wikipedia (Wikimedia Deutschland), RENDER has set up this case study with the goal to implement and test the project’s tools that shall facilitate the management of diversity in Wikipedia content. This allows for better assessing the quality of entries, to mediate conflicts between editors and to understand inconsistency in regards to socio-demographic, spatio-temporal and opinion-based divergences.

Data sources and users: The free and open Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the top ten Web sites in the world. It is available in more than 250 different languages. There are about 2.900.000 articles created freely by Wikipedia’s users.

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Diversity-aware news aggregation for Google

Objective: Google News is a news aggregator service by Google Ltd, the globally dominant search engine provider with a market share of almost 85%. Google News offers more than forty regional issues in more than 15 languages. The German regional issue alone aggregates more than 700 German-written news sources globally. In this context, RENDER under the lead of Google Ltd. defines this case study to enhance the Google News service with diversity-aware ranking of news posts in order to not only offer a listing of important news articles, but to cover most diverse view points on a particular topic. Moreover, through this show case, news articles will be enriched with data from other sources like blogs, tweets, and wiki pages to increase the interconnection between diversifying sources on
the Web, again with the goal to cover news stories more extensively.

Data sources and users: Currently Google collects news items from about 25,000 sources. Furthermore, Google collects items provided by non-professional Web users, like blogs, tweets, etc. The new diversified services will be made available to all Google users.

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Diversity-enhanced customer relationship management

Objective: The Spanish company Telefonica S.A. is the third largest broadband and telecommunication provider in the world, offering services in more than 170 countries. Serving over 280 millions customers, Telefonica deals with diversely expressed feedback on a daily basis. In this case study, Telefonica and its RENDER partners will ameliorate the exploitation of information that Telefonica gathers from various channels (call center contacts, various company Web sites, and public forums) with the goal to react more efficiently and effectively to opinions and sentiments of customers, to make more precise forecasts, and to eventually improve future business decisions.

Data sources and users: Call centers have a total of 15 million contacts per month, online Web sites have 65,000 visitors per month, and open forums have more than 2.6 million posts per month. Currently it is not possible to fully exploit the knowledge and information in these sources.

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