Hoi,
Just consider, when a language is taught in secondary school and a
Wikipedia has < 2500 articles.. What is the purpose of all education
related research particularly when in university the language is not
taught? Now consider that our research is about professor types teaching on
universities ... interesting sure applicable hardly. In the same vein, with
< 2500 articles we DO want secondary school information included. When you
consider languages like Malayalam, the importance of Wikisource compared to
English is utterly different. English has Open Library and while it is
wonderful, its user interface is English only..
When you consider the use of Commons and Wikidata, they are not at all
usable in most other languages AND we do not have a strategy how to make
them usable in other languages. Realise that the technical ability to make
things multi lingual does not make them usable in multiple languages.. It
is why I have my Africa project and hope to find people interesting in the
approach. [1]
The problem with science is not in the science itself. The problem is that
any marketing notion are absent. You study how it works and it does not
translate in ways and means that make a difference. Even the notion of
teaching Wikidata by teaching them to query is in and of itself problematic
[2]. It is problematic because there are no labels in other languages and
there are no strategies to populate the labels in other languages not even
for sub sets.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 13:36, Jan Dittrich <jan.dittrich(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
Hello researchers,
A lot of research on Wikipedia is published in English and also uses the
English Wikipedia as source of data or researchers get their participants
via English Wikipedia [0].
A frequent criticism I meet when discussing such research with non-en.wp
community members is that their Wikipedia is different and the results of
en.wp base research are problematic/incomparable/totally useless.
So I want to ask:
- Do you know of research comparing different Wikis, preferably across
language versions? [1]
- How would you deal with such criticism, particularly of the "if it is not
about 'my' wp it is useless"-kind [2]?
Kind Regards,
Jan
____
[0] Plausible due to academi fields, particularly Computer Science,
publishing mainly in english, size and WMF as actor being US-based.
[1] I know of »revisiting "The Rise and Decline" in a Population of Peer
Production Projects« (
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173929),
comparing different Wikia-Wikis; Research like "limits of
self-organization" (
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/1405/1323) that
refer to general principles of peer production. Comparisons of Wikipedias
across languages and the impact of their different contexts, languages and
regulations would be very interesting to me.
[2] I'm aware that making heterogeneous things comparable is seen as a core
academic/scientific activity in STS research (Law, SL Star, Turnbull…) so I
do not want to say, transfer to a different setting is not a problem – but
it is certainly not "totally useless" either.
--
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ Research
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
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