Hi all,
Join the Research Team at the Wikimedia Foundation [1] for their monthly
Office hours on 2020-12-01 at 17:00-18:00 PM UTC (9am PT/6pm CET).
To participate, join the video-call via this Wikimedia-meet link [2]. There
is no set agenda - feel free to add your item to the list of topics in the
etherpad [3] (You can do this after you join the meeting, too.), otherwise
you are welcome to also just hang out. More detailed information (e.g.
about how to attend) can be found here [4].
Through these office hours, we aim to make ourselves more available to
answer some of the research related questions that you as Wikimedia
volunteer editors, organizers, affiliates, staff, and researchers face in
your projects and initiatives. Some example cases we hope to be able to
support you in:
-
You have a specific research related question that you suspect you
should be able to answer with the publicly available data and you don’t
know how to find an answer for it, or you just need some more help with it.
For example, how can I compute the ratio of anonymous to registered editors
in my wiki?
-
You run into repetitive or very manual work as part of your Wikimedia
contributions and you wish to find out if there are ways to use machines to
improve your workflows. These types of conversations can sometimes be
harder to find an answer for during an office hour, however, discussing
them can help us understand your challenges better and we may find ways to
work with each other to support you in addressing it in the future.
-
You want to learn what the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation
does and how we can potentially support you. Specifically for affiliates:
if you are interested in building relationships with the academic
institutions in your country, we would love to talk with you and learn
more. We have a series of programs that aim to expand the network of
Wikimedia researchers globally and we would love to collaborate with those
of you interested more closely in this space.
-
You want to talk with us about one of our existing programs [5].
Hope to see many of you,
Martin (WMF Research Team)
[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
[2] https://meet.wmcloud.org/ResearchOfficeHours
[3] https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Research-Analytics-Office-hours
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[5] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello, everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, November 18,
at 9:30 AM PST/17:30 UTC, and will be on the theme of interpersonal
communication between editors. Interpersonal communication, for example via
talk pages, plays a crucial role for editors to coordinate their efforts in
online collaborative communities. For this month’s showcase we have invited
2 speakers sharing their research on getting a deeper understanding of
interpersonal communication on Wikipedia. In the first talk, Anna Rader
will give an overview on editors’ communication networks and patterns, and
the different types of dynamics commonly found in the way that users
interact. In the second talk, Sneha Narayan presents recent work
investigating whether easier interpersonal communication leads to enhanced
productivity and newcomer participation across more than 200 wikis.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G35OEDJ53bY
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
This month's presentations:
Talk before you type - Interpersonal communication on Wikipedia
By Dr Anna Rader, Research Consultant
Formally, the work of Wikipedia’s community of volunteers is asynchronous
and anarchic: around the world, editors labor individually and in
disorganized ways on the collective project. Yet this work is also
underscored by informal and vibrant interpersonal communication: in the
lively exchanges of talk pages and the labor-sharing of editorial networks,
anonymous strangers communicate their intentions and coordinate their
efforts to maintain the world’s largest online encyclopaedia. This working
paper offers an overview of academic research into editors’ communication
networks and patterns, with a particular focus on the role of talk pages.
It considers four communication dynamics of editor interaction:
cooperation, deliberation, conflict and coordination; and reviews key
recommendations for enhancing peer-to-peer communication within the
Wikipedia community.
All Talk - How Increasing Interpersonal Communication on Wikis May Not
Enhance Productivity
By Sneha Narayan, Assistant Professor, Carlton College
What role does interpersonal communication play in sustaining production in
online collaborative communities? This paper sheds light on that question
by examining the impact of a communication feature called "message walls"
that allows for faster and more intuitive interpersonal communication in a
population of wikis on Wikia. Using panel data from a sample of 275 wiki
communities that migrated to message walls and a method inspired by
regression discontinuity designs, we analyze these transitions and estimate
the impact of the system's introduction. Although the adoption of message
walls was associated with increased communication among all editors and
newcomers, it had little effect on productivity, and was further associated
with a decrease in article contributions from new editors. Our results
imply that design changes that make communication easier in a social
computing system may not always translate to increased participation along
other dimensions.
-
Paper <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359203>
--
Janna Layton (she/her)
Administrative Associate - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi!
Next Monday, 2020-11016, I will be doing some maintenance on stat1008 in the
EU/CET morning. During this, there will be disruption of everything there and
there will be multiple reboots. Afterwards, the machine will be running a newer
kernel (5.8) and updated GPU drivers/rocm library (3.8). This is the same update
as the one I did the week before last, on stat1005.
If you have any questions or concerns, let us know.
Best,
Tobias
--
Tobias Klausmann, SRE, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
Join the Research Team at the Wikimedia Foundation [1] for their monthly
Office hours on Tuesday, 2020-11-03 at 17:00-18:00 PM UTC (9am PT/6pm CET).
To participate, join the video-call via this Wikimedia-meet link [2]. There
is no set agenda - feel free to add your item to the list of topics in the
etherpad [3] (You can do this after you join the meeting, too.), otherwise
you are welcome to also just hang out. More detailed information (e.g.
about how to attend) can be found here [4].
Through these office hours, we aim to make ourselves more available to
answer some of the research related questions that you as Wikimedia
volunteer editors, organizers, affiliates, staff, and researchers face in
your projects and initiatives. Some example cases we hope to be able to
support you in:
-
You have a specific research related question that you suspect you
should be able to answer with the publicly available data and you don’t
know how to find an answer for it, or you just need some more help with it.
For example, how can I compute the ratio of anonymous to registered editors
in my wiki?
-
You run into repetitive or very manual work as part of your Wikimedia
contributions and you wish to find out if there are ways to use machines to
improve your workflows. These types of conversations can sometimes be
harder to find an answer for during an office hour, however, discussing
them can help us understand your challenges better and we may find ways to
work with each other to support you in addressing it in the future.
-
You want to learn what the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation
does and how we can potentially support you. Specifically for affiliates:
if you are interested in building relationships with the academic
institutions in your country, we would love to talk with you and learn
more. We have a series of programs that aim to expand the network of
Wikimedia researchers globally and we would love to collaborate with those
of you interested more closely in this space.
-
You want to talk with us about one of our existing programs [5].
Hope to see many of you,
Martin (WMF Research Team)
[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
[2] https://meet.wmcloud.org/ResearchOfficeHours
[3] https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Research-Analytics-Office-hours
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[5] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation