Hi all,

The next Research Showcase, focused on Rules on Wikipedia, will be live-streamed on Wednesday, September 20, at 9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here. 

YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/h89l9JWZBCU?feature=share. As usual, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. 

This month's presentations: 

Variation and overlap in the peer production of community rules: the case of five Wikipedias

By Sohyeon Hwang, Northwestern University

In this talk, I present work analyzing the rules and rule-making on Wikipedia. The governance of many online communities relies on rules created by participants. However, work predominantly focuses on efforts within a single community or on a platform as a whole. Here we investigate the comparative and relational dimensions of online self-governance in a set of similar communities by looking at the five largest language editions of Wikipedia. Using exhaustive trace data spanning almost 20 years since their founding, we examine patterns in rule-making and overlaps in rule sets. Our findings show that language editions have similar trajectories of rule-making activity, replicating and extending a rich body of work that have focused on English-language Wikipedia alone. We also find that the language editions have increasingly unique rule sets, even as editing activity concentrates on rules shared between them. The results suggest that self-governing communities aligned in key ways may share a common core of rules and rule-making practices even as they develop and sustain institutional variations.

Wikipedia Community Policies and Experiential Epistemology: Critical Information Literacy, Social Justice, and Inclusive Practices

By Zachary J. McDowell, University of Illinois at Chicago

Drawing from a meta-analysis of research on learning outcomes in Wikipedia-based education, this presentation addresses Wikipedia community policies and practices through the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education from the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL). Wikipedia-based educational practices, which promote newcomers’ active engagement in the encyclopedia, have been shown to support experiential learnings in critical information literacy, communication and research outcomes, and social justice. Exploring the connections between participation in Wikipedia and transferable skills for information literacy in the context of the current new media landscape, this presentation grapples with new questions for the future of information literacies alongside the implications of large language models (LLMs), systemic biases, and the representation and inclusion of non-western and indigenous knowledge sources.

You can also watch our past research showcases here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Shshowcase

Best,

Kinneret

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Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation

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