Human Diversity seminar 26.2.2025, Ho-Dac

Wednesday 26.2. 2025
at 12.15-13.15

Dr. Lydia-Mai Ho-Dac, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France
Talking to oneself and enter into discussion : two observable behaviors in Wikipedia talk pages.

Abstract: This talk proposes to study interactions between Wikipedians as they take place on Wikipedia talk pages, the behind-the-scenes of well-known Wikipedia articles. We propose to analyze how users interact on these Wikipedia talk pages in a dataset of 4 million threads from English and French Wikipedia talk pages. The study begins with an overview of the main structural features that emerge by taking into account just three simple characteristics: who posts, when they post and who they post after. This analysis reveals some puzzling behaviors that we propose to study in a more qualitative approach: monologue, i.e. when a user replies to himself, and multiparty conversations, i.e. when a third participant intervenes in an ongoing dialogue. After an initial exploratory examination of the linguistic characteristics of these threads, we were able to define a typology of the reasons behind these behaviors. We then proceeded to annotate four samples of threads (100 per case and per language) and compared the performance of human annotators and LLMs. The talk will present the method and results of this annotation and comparison.

Location: Natura, lecture hall IX

Zoom: https://utu.zoom.us/j/61515345616