Social Knowledge Harvesting Based on a Geographically-annotated Wiki. Case Study: History and Culture of Ambato

Crowdsourcing platforms have become an essential part of e-collaboration among citizens. Wikis play an important role in this scenario because they allow content creation and shared edition of contributions. Nevertheless, none of the wikis we are aware of facilitates the geographical annotation of content, even when location is important metadata when talking about social development. This work focuses on the enrichment of an open source wiki for making it possible to manage the geographical metadata of contributions. Social knowledge harvesting in a medium-sized community in Ecuador was used as a case study for evaluating the proposal. The experiment took place during one month with the participation of 63 young citizens. A total of 57 wiki pages were created and 118 editions were made. The amount of information retrieved by the community is greater than the volume contained in the 18 contributions found in Wikipedia. Further, the general opinion of the experiment participants is that the resulting wiki actually supports an improved social knowledge harvesting. This last finding is supported by the statistical analysis of a survey whose design was based on the Technology Acceptance Model and on the Nielsen's ten usability heuristics. A high correlation among variables corroborates the high degree of acceptance of the proposal.