Source-linked AI summary
Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0
Angelo Di Iorio, Fabio Vitali, Davide Rossi, Stefano Zacchiroli
TL;DR
Web 2.0 communities need rules and best practices, but enforcing them through existing tools can be intrusive or impractical. The paper proposes a layered annotation framework that checks content without altering normal workflows, while allowing users to select shared rule sets and correct flagged content later. Its main design boundary is that the language for expressing validation rules remains outside the paper’s scope.
Problem
Web 2.0 communities use organizational rules and best practices, but enforcing them through existing or externally hosted tools is often impractical.
Method
The framework layers rule-based user-defined annotations and validation agents over existing wiki tools, producing optional, localized reports without altering the original content or workflow.
Results
The framework supports shared rules that users independently subscribe to, with annotations appearing when subscribed rules are violated rather than enforcing compliance.
Takeaways & Limitations
Organizations and users can add automatic, on-the-fly annotations to wiki resources while preserving the origin application’s normal workflow.
Takeaways & Limitations
The choice of language for expressing validation rules is outside the scope of the present work.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based) annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools (with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict adherence to a set of rules.
1. INTRODUCTION
Web 2.0 tools support emergent communities with few imposed structural assumptions, but these communities still rely on organizational rules and best practices. The paper proposes a non-intrusive, layered rule-checking service that annotates suspicious content and lets users choose which shared rules to apply.
- Web 2.0 social software fosters web-based organizations while promoting emergent coordination rather than assuming a specific organizational structure.
- As these tools spread from bazaar-like to cathedral-like organizations, requirements for organization-specific rules become increasingly important.
- Some community rules concern content, while structural rules such as image-size limits or required document sections can benefit from automatic checking.
- Extending tools to enforce local rules can sacrifice future software updates, and modifying code is impossible when services are externally hosted.
- The proposed framework layers a rule-checking service over existing tools, highlighting suspicious content without enforcement and allowing later correction.
- Users can activate selected rule sets because practices may be shared across organizations and different organizational roles may require different checks.
2. THE NEED FOR EXTERNALIZED AND PERSONALIZED CONTENT
Wikis contain many community best practices, but enforcing them can constrain open editing and require changes to tools that organizations may not control. RU Annotations externalize personalized, rule-based checking as an annotation layer that verifies content without modifying the original workflow or resource.
- Motivation: Many wiki best practices concern page structure, templates, or code syntax, and can be checked automatically even when they cannot be enforced.Examples include common structures for similar entities, template conformity, and syntactic verification of code snippets.
- Motivation: Strict enforcement can distort the open wiki model, making light verification preferable to preventing users from saving or editing content.The framework reports violations while allowing users to ignore them and continue modifying pages freely.
- RU Annotations: RU Annotations let users declare properties or filters whose rules are processed on-the-fly to generate personalized annotated views of web content.Annotations may be personal, group-shared, or community-wide, and are merged with the original page when displayed.
- RU Annotations: The framework adds annotations without changing the original resource, enabling users to assess or filter content they may not be entitled to modify.It can support feedback about accessibility, reputation, inappropriate strings, and other content decisions before or during reading.
- Architecture: Sharing annotation-generating rules supports subgroup policies without requiring modifications to the wiki platform code.This externalized, user-based customization motivates the term “Rule-based User-defined Annotations.”
- Architecture: Unlike personalization embedded in a wiki engine, RU Annotations apply rules externally and a posteriori, preserving the original wiki workflow.Validators can be internal, external, or pluggable, while the validation language remains an implementation choice outside this paper's scope.
5. RELATED WORKS
Prior annotation systems primarily support manual notes or broad automatic content analysis, whereas RU annotations automatically generate localized annotations by checking declared properties and constraints. RU targets specific contexts to integrate heterogeneous web information through transparent post-processing and achieve more precise results.
- External-annotation standards and tools include RDF-based Annotea, XLink-based applications, and browser-supported platforms such as Diigo and Sharecopy.
- Manual annotation systems let users highlight web fragments and add localized notes, while RU annotations are generated automatically from declared properties and constraints.
- Automatic web-page analysis uses visual, layout-based, DOM-based, heuristic, and statistical techniques to extract structure or information from heterogeneous content.
- RU annotations instead target a specific context, enabling more precise results while retaining the broader goal of transparent post-processing across heterogeneous web resources.
6. CONCLUSIONS
The framework adds rule-based annotations to wiki resources without interfering with the origin application's normal workflow. Communities can share best-practice rules while users independently choose which rules to subscribe to and receive annotations when violations occur.
- The framework adds rule-based annotations to wiki resources without interfering with the origin application's normal workflow.
- Annotations can support on-the-fly decisions about a page's content, validity, or appropriateness before it is displayed.
- Communities can share best-practice rules while individual users independently subscribe according to their interests or organizational roles.
- Users can activate subscribed checks through browser options, extensions, filtering proxies, or bookmarklets, with annotations layered onto documents when violations occur.