Thanks a lot for bringing this up.
Sorry for not offering a solution, but I do want to mention a
frequently-missed aspect of the problem: Wikis in different languages have
some differences that are understandable because they reflect some
objective cultural characteristics of the people who speak it. But some
differences are artificial and exit because in the early days of Wikimedia
(mid-2000s) there were no convenient ways for wikis to communicate and
share info. There were no global accounts and no convenient translation
tools.
Templates are still not global, even though there is huge demand for it,[1]
and a lot of community process are implemented using templates: requests
for deletion, requests for unblocking, article sorting for WikiProjects,
stub sorting. Many of these things could be unified, at least partially, by
making templates global, and among many benefits, it would make research
easier, too.
[1] It came at #3 in the Community Wishlist vote in 2015, and at #1 in
2016. Despite this demand, it was not implemented :(
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
בתאריך יום ד׳, 2 באוק׳ 2019 ב-14:37 מאת Jan Dittrich <
jan.dittrich@wikimedia.de>:
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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