Thomas Steiner

Thomas Steiner

In this paper, we introduce the Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets. Google Spreadsheets is part of a free, Web-based software office suite offered by Google within its Google Docs service. It allows users to create and edit spreadsheets online, while collaborating with other users in realtime. Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, whose content and data is available, among other means, through an API. With the Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets, we have created a toolkit that facilitates working with Wikipedia data from within a spreadsheet context. We make these tools available as open-source on GitHub [https://github.com/tomayac/wikipedia-tools-for-google-spreadsheets], released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

Thomas Steiner, François Beaufort

In this demonstration, we show how special hardware like Nintendo Joy-Con controllers can be made accessible from the Web through the new WebHID API. This novel technology proposal allows developers to write Web drivers in pure JavaScript that talk to Human Interface Device (HID) devices via the HID protocol. One such example of a driver has been realized in the project Joy-Con-WebHID, which allows for fun pastimes like playing the Google Chrome browser's offline dinosaur game by jumping. This works thanks to the accelerometers built into Joy-Con controllers whose signals are read out by the driver and used to control the game character in the browser. A video of the experience is available.

Thomas Steiner

With the ability to watch Wikipedia and Wikidata edits in realtime, the online encyclopedia and the knowledge base have become increasingly used targets of research for the detection of breaking news events. In this paper, we present a case study of the 2014 Winter Olympics, where we tell the story of breaking news events in the context of the Olympics with the help of social multimedia stemming from multiple social network sites. Therefore, we have extended the application Wikipedia Live Monitor-a tool for the detection of breaking news events-with the capability of automatically creating media galleries that illustrate events. Athletes winning an Olympic competition, a new country leading the medal table, or simply the Olympics themselves are all events newsworthy enough for people to concurrently edit Wikipedia and Wikidata-around the world in many languages. The Olympics being an event of common interest, an even bigger majority of people share the event in a multitude of languages on global social network sites, which makes the event an ideal subject of study. With this work, we connect the world of Wikipedia and Wikidata with the world of social network sites, in order to convey the spirit of the 2014 Winter Olympics, to tell the story of victory and defeat, and always following the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius. The proposed system-generalized for all sort of breaking news stories-has been put in production in form of the Twitter bot @mediagalleries, available and archived at https://twitter.com/mediagalleries.

Thomas Steiner, Seth van Hooland, Ed Summers

We have developed an application called Wikipedia Live Monitor that monitors article edits on different language versions of Wikipedia, as they happen in realtime. Wikipedia articles in different languages are highly interlinked. For example, the English article en:2013_Russian_meteor_event on the topic of the February 15 meteoroid that exploded over the region of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, is interlinked with the Russian article on the same topic. As we monitor multiple language versions of Wikipedia in parallel, we can exploit this fact to detect concurrent edit spikes of Wikipedia articles covering the same topics, both in only one, and in different languages. We treat such concurrent edit spikes as signals for potential breaking news events, whose plausibility we then check with full-text cross-language searches on multiple social networks. Unlike the reverse approach of monitoring social networks first, and potentially checking plausibility on Wikipedia second, the approach proposed in this paper has the advantage of being less prone to false-positive alerts, while being equally sensitive to true-positive events, however, at only a fraction of the processing cost.