WikiDo
Author(s)
Kushman, Nate; Brodsky, Micah Z. (Micah Zev); Branavan, Satchuthanan R.; Katabi, Dina; Barzilay, Regina; Rinard, Martin C.; ... Show more Show less
DownloadBarzilay_WikiDo.pdf (164.6Kb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The Internet has allowed collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Wikipedia, Luis Von Ahn’s ESP game, and reCAPTCHA have proven that tasks typically performed by expensive in-house or outsourced teams can instead be delegated to the mass of Internet computer users. These success stories show the opportunity for crowdsourcing other tasks, such as allowing computer users to help each other answer questions like “How do I make my computer do X?”. Such a system would reduce IT cost, user frustration, and machine downtime. The current approach to crowd-sourcing IT tasks, however, only allows users to collaborate on generating text. Anyone who goes through the process of searching help wikis and user forums hoping to find a solution for some computer problem knows the inefficacy and the frustration accompanying such a process. Text is ambiguous and often incomplete, particularly when written by non-experts. This paper presents WikiDo, a system that enables the mass of non-expert users to help each other answer how-to computer questions by actually performing the task rather than documenting its solution.
Description
Not formally published
Date issued
2010-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Eighth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-VIII), 2009
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Kushman, Nate, et al. (2009) "WikiDo." Eighth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, (HotNets-VIII), October 22-23, 2009, New York City, NY.
Version: Author's final manuscript