Hi everyone,
We sent a separate e-mail introducing our systematic literature review on
Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in English.
We hope that our review would provide useful insights for the research community. Thus, we
would like to ask your help in reviewing the research questions we have developed for the
data extraction and synthesis phases of our review. Currently, we address the following
review research questions:
1. What high-quality research has been conducted with Wikipedia as a major topic or data
source? As mentioned in the introductory e-mail, we have already identified over 2,100
studies, though we will only analyze the journal articles and doctoral theses in detail.
We will group the articles by field of study.
2. What research questions have been asked by various sources, both academic scholarly and
practitioner? We want to know both the subjects that the existing research has covered,
and also catalogue key questions that practitioners would like to be answered, whether or
not academic research has broached these questions. Also, we categorize the research
questions based on their purposes. We have more comments on this research question below.
3. What theoretical frameworks and reference theories have been used to study the topic?
We are very interested in theory-driven research on Wikipedia, and would like to identify
and categorize such work.
4. What research designs have been employed to answer research questions? By
"research design", we include all that is commonly called research
"methodologies" or "approaches".
5. What kinds of data have been collected for research purposes? Specifically, we note the
data collection techniques, the time dimension (one-time snapshot or longitudinal
observations over time), the unit of analysis, the technique used for extracting Wikipedia
data (e.g. live Wikipedia or Wikipedia clone server), the Wikipedia page type, and the
Wikipedia language.
6. What conclusions have been made from existing research? That is, what questions from
RQ2 have been answered, and what are these answers?
7. What questions from RQ2 are left unanswered? (These present directions for future
research.)
Do you have any comments or feedback on these questions? On one hand, we want to extract
useful data from the studies that could be helpful to researchers. On the other hand, we
have to be pragmatic, considering what we can cover when we're dealing with over 600
peer-reviewed studies.
Beyond these basic questions, we have a special note regarding our RQ2, on the research
questions that have been asked. In addition to the research questions that we extract from
the articles, we want to know what questions are of interest that have not been studied.
For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related research questions. Of note
to academics and researchers is the collection at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Quest…. Could you
please review this list and update that page directly with any additional questions?
Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could update the list.
In addition, we are even more interested in questions that practitioners are asking, other
than what researchers are asking. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are
also Wikipedia "practitioners", we define practitioner here as someone involved
in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly researcher.) Thus, we are sending a
separate e-mail to wikipedia-l, foundation-l, and wikiEN-l asking them to update the list
of Foundation research questions at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals.
Thanks for your help.
Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
(
http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content…)
Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada