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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