Pursuant to prior discussions about the need for a research
policy on Wikipedia, WikiProject Research is drafting a
policy regarding the recruitment of Wikipedia users to
participate in studies.
At this time, we have a proposed policy, and an accompanying
group that would facilitate recruitment of subjects in much
the same way that the Bot Approvals Group approves bots.
The policy proposal can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research
The Subject Recruitment Approvals Group mentioned in the proposal
is being described at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group
Before we move forward with seeking approval from the Wikipedia
community, we would like additional input about the proposal,
and would welcome additional help improving it.
Also, please consider participating in WikiProject Research at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Research
--
Bryan Song
GroupLens Research
University of Minnesota
Hello all,
I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Wikimedia Foundation
research committee, with 11 initial members. You can find more
information and bios here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee
The purpose of the committee is to help organize policies, practices
and priorities around Wikimedia-related research. Thanks to everyone
who applied to join the committee.
We're using a publicly archived mailing list as our primary means of
communication, if you're interested in following what's going on:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
We'll also begin working on the pages on meta.wikimedia.org to make
them more useful, and we'll have a first IRC meeting soon.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Ed Summers has done some nice analysis of the top hosts referenced in article space, based on SQL dumps:
http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/08/25/top-hosts-referenced-in-wikipedia-pa…
People with more in-depth knowledge might make something of this -- for instance the importance of bots in external links, or the prevalence of certain types of information.
For instance, why/where/how is edwardbetts.com used? (doesn't seem to be postcode data, which was my first guess)
See also his linkypedia code:
http://github.com/edsu/linkypedia
-Jodi
Dear Wikimedia research community,
I want to bring to your attention two full-time staff positions with
the Wikimedia Foundation that we're currently hiring for:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Senior_Research_Analyst_-_…http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Senior_Research_Analyst_-_…
These two have a slightly different focus. The strategy position,
reporting to me, is closely linked to Wikimedia's product development
roadmap (translating research findings into product decisions), and
has an overall coordinating function. The Global Development position,
reporting to the Chief Global Development Officer, Barry Newstead,
directly supports our work in expanding Wikimedia's presence and
programmatic activities world-wide, with special focus on
disadvantaged and underrepresented communities.
For the strategy role, I'd love to get someone with existing deep
Wikimedia experience (as a researcher and/or editor), even if they
don't meet the exact requirements in the JD.
These jobs are based in San Francisco, California, so if you're not
based in the SF Bay Area, let us know if you're willing to relocate.
Please see the postings above for further information, and please help
get the word out in your communities.
These positions are separate from the volunteer research committee
(although of course these staff positions are expected to interface
with the r-com), and you should feel free to apply for these positions
even if you've already applied to be on the r-com.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Greetings!
I'm a computer science researcher at the University of Washington. In
the past few years, I've done a number of studies examining e.g.
deliberation on wikipedia through policy use and the division of valued
work through barnstars.
I've recently designed and built a new discussion interface for
improving web based discussions called Reflect
(http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/travis/reflect/). Jonathan Morgan
presented it at Wikimania this year
(http://www.slideshare.net/jtmorgan/wikimania-reflect).
We're now trying to run a study to see how well it works and get insight
into the next steps we take in its design. At the same time, we'd like
to help Wikimedia gain insight into the development of LiquidThreads.
We are proposing to run a study with the cooperation of Wikimedia. The
study proposal is outlined here:
http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~travis/liquidreflection/index.php/Discus…
We would love to get your input, particularly on the talk page:
http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~travis/liquidreflection/index.php/Talk:D…
LiquidThreads + Reflect is implemented on that talk page, as well as the
in-situ survey methodology described in the proposal. Jonathan has
seeded the talk page with some discussion topics.
Thank you for your consideration!!!
Cheers,
Travis
It seems that no one actually announced the creation of the
"newprojects" mailing list yet!
The mailing list[1] is an announcement-only list for new Wikimedia
wikis[2]. The way it works is that the addwiki.php[3] script that
sysadmins use to create the wikis automatically sends a mail to the
list, so (provided there are no bugs with the script) subscribers will
get an e-mail when every Wikimedia wiki is created.
This list should be especially useful for people who need to know when
new wikis are created so that they can update their tools or scripts.
Of course, people who are just interested in knowing about new wikis
are welcomed to subscribe too. :-)
[1]https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/newprojects
[2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
[3]http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Add_a_wiki
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
Hello, all.
After receiving the feedback from our presentation of the status of Flagged-Revision study in Wikimania 2010, we now need some help from the community to finalize this challenging project.
Our purpose is to compare the patters we have identified for vandalism revertion in GE Wikipedia with 2 other communities also using Flagged-Revisions, namely Polish and Russian Wikipedias.
So, we would need:
* If there exist a list of well-known tags added to the comments field whenever a revert is performed in any of these 2 editions.
* If so, a list of matching words or tags we should look for using regexps to identify such reverts.
* Any other useful hints (like tags that show up frequently but whose meaning could change depending on subsequent words).
Any comment tag identifying a revert is useful, but we're mainly focused on vandalism revert.
That's also why we are not currently using the MD5 hash approach (we do need to differentiate among different types of reverts, not only detect them).
Please, forward this message to any relevant mailing list where local wikimedians contributing to these languages could help us.
You can answer to the list, or directly to this email account.
Thanks in advance.
Felipe.
(I sent this to a couple of lists already, but i though it might also be
interresting for the research community)
Hi all! For a long time I wanted a decent push interface for
RecentChanges-Events, so it becomes easy to follow changes on a wiki. Parsing
messages on IRC is unreliable, and polling the API sucks (and is also
unreliable, see Bug 24782).
So, I have written XMLRC <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC> and set
up a prototype on the Toolserver - have a look at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Recentchanges_via_XMPP> for details. Basically,
you point any Jabber client to the chat room
<enwiki(a)conference.jabber.toolserver.org> to see the change events, like on IRC.
However, if you use a client aware of the extra data attached to the messages,
like <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC/rcclient.py>, you will get
all the information you can get from the API (in fact, you can get the exact
same XML tag).
Try it out and let me know what you think!
-- daniel
Some time ago as a Python/Django/JQuery/pywikipedia exercise I've hacked a
web based recent changes patrol tool. An alpha version can be seen at the:
http://www.wpcvn.com
It includes a few interesting features that may be useful to the community
(& researchers designing similar tools):
1. tool uses editors ratings, primarily based on user counters (includes
reverted revisions counters) calculated using the wiki dump;
2. site members can see each other reviewing;
3. site members can see edits being reverted (with ratings of the reverting
editor);
4. site members can confirm their nicknames (bind to the account on the
Wikipedia, the tool can catch/identify a GUID in the edit comment to
WP:SANDBOX);
5. can aggregate IRC feeds from bots (currently only MiszaBot is supported).
WPCVN yet another collaborative *(it shows other users actions - patrols and
reverts)* Web 2.0 RC patrol tool that runs in a browser. It has been tested
with Firefox <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox>,
IE<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE>and Google
Chrome <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome>. Currently operates for
en-wiki only in the alpha <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_testing> mode.
WPCVN aggregates recent changes IRC feed, IRC feed from the MiszaBot and
WPCVN user actions. It also uses pre-calculated Wikipedia users "karma"
(based on the recent en-wiki dump analysis) to separate edits made by users
with clearly good or bad reputation. The tool is open source (LGPL) and uses
JQuery/JQueryUI + Django backend.
-- Regards, Dmitry