SoCS: Collaborative Research: Information Farming: Intelligent Interfaces for an Online Production Community

社会生产社区可以成为强大的引擎，利用许多个人的努力来生产有价值的人工制品和知识。然而，他们的成功关键取决于成员有效贡献的能力。随着社区规模和复杂性的增长，成员对内容和协作的理解也面临着挑战。这些挑战降低了团队合作的能力和工作产品的质量。研究人员建议将人类与智能界面合作，以提高贡献效率。 他们将创建智能算法和界面，不仅支持人们简单地搜寻信息，还支持信息农业，在信息农业中，社区成员共同努力种植社区所需信息的种子，培育这些种子成长为有价值的信息，并剔除有损农场价值的信息。并将这些理论扩展到人们产生信息的环境中。 研究人员将在扩展理论的基础上探索新的算法和接口，并将开展研究，以了解理论在实践中的作用。社会生产社区在经济和社会方面都很重要。开源软件在我们的经济中占很大比例;维基百科正在彻底改变知识生产和消费，提供对人类历史上收集的最大知识库之一的免费访问。 这项研究将直接改善维基百科，并有助于理解社会生产社区的工作方式。

Social production communities can be powerful engines for harnessing the efforts of many individuals to produce valuable artifacts and knowledge. However, their success critically depends on members' ability to effectively contribute. As the size and complexity of the community grows, so do challenges to members' understanding of the content and collaboration. These challenges decrease the ability of the team to work together, and the quality of the work product.The researchers propose partnering humans with intelligent interfaces that improve contribution effectiveness. They will create intelligent algorithms and interfaces that go beyond supporting people simply foraging for information to information farming, in which members of the community work together to plant the seeds of the information the community needs, nurture the growth of those seeds into valuable information, and weed out the information that detracts from the value of the farm.The research is based on theories of human information processing, and will extend those theories to environments in which people are producing information. The researchers will explore new algorithms and interfaces based on the extended theories, and will carry out studies to understand how the theories work in practice.Social production communities are economically and socially important. Open source software runs large parts of our economy; Wikipedia is revolutionizing knowledge production and consumption, providing free access to one of the largest bodies of knowledge gathered in human history. The proposed research will directly improve Wikipedia, and will contribute to understanding how social production communities work.