[Foundation-l] Request for feedback on research questions for Wikipedia literature review

[Chitu Okoli]

[Apologies for cross-posting; this same e-mail is being sent to wikipedia-l, WikiEN-l and foundation-l]

Hi everyone,

We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages, we unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about Wikipedia only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do include studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are published in English.) We have completed a search using many major databases of scholarly research. We've posted separate messages to wiki-research-l related to this literature review.

We have identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have "wikipedia", "wikipedian", or "wikipedians" in their title, abstract or keywords. As this number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses; we identified 638 such studies. In addition, we identified around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles.

We hope that our review would provide useful insights for both wikipedians and researchers. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are also wikipedians, we define wikipedian or "Wikipedia practitioner" here as someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly researcher.) In particular, here is a list of some of the research questions we are investigating in our review that are particularly pertinent to wikipedians (you can check wiki-research-l for the full set of 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 638 of them in depth. 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.

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.)


Regarding our RQ2, on the research questions that have been asked, we want to identify not only the research questions that we extract from the articles, but also what questions are of interest that have not been studied. For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related research questions.

We are most of all interested in questions that wikipedians are asking, other than what researchers are asking. There is an old list of research questions or goals at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals; these questions are about Wikimedia Foundation projects in general, though Wikipedia is of course included. 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.

Another bank of questions we have identified is more directed towards academics and researchers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Questions. We have asked the wiki-research-l subscribers to update that list. We will draw from both lists for our bank of research questions.

Thanks for your help.

Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
(http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content.html)
Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada