Hi all,
The next Research Showcase, focused on *Rules on Wikipedia*, will be
live-streamed on Wednesday, September 20, at 9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find
your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1695227400>.
YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/h89l9JWZBCU?feature=share
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://youtube.com/live/h89l9JWZBCU?feature%3…>.
As usual, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the
showcase goes live.
This month's presentations:
Variation and overlap in the peer production of community rules: the case
of five WikipediasBy *Sohyeon Hwang, Northwestern University*
In this talk, I present work analyzing the rules and rule-making on
Wikipedia. The governance of many online communities relies on rules
created by participants. However, work predominantly focuses on efforts
within a single community or on a platform as a whole. Here we investigate
the comparative and relational dimensions of online self-governance in a
set of similar communities by looking at the five largest language editions
of Wikipedia. Using exhaustive trace data spanning almost 20 years since
their founding, we examine patterns in rule-making and overlaps in rule
sets. Our findings show that language editions have similar trajectories of
rule-making activity, replicating and extending a rich body of work that
have focused on English-language Wikipedia alone. We also find that the
language editions have increasingly unique rule sets, even as editing
activity concentrates on rules shared between them. The results suggest
that self-governing communities aligned in key ways may share a common core
of rules and rule-making practices even as they develop and sustain
institutional variations.
Wikipedia Community Policies and Experiential Epistemology: Critical
Information Literacy, Social Justice, and Inclusive PracticesBy *Zachary J.
McDowell, University of Illinois at Chicago*Drawing from a meta-analysis of
research on learning outcomes in Wikipedia-based education, this
presentation addresses Wikipedia community policies and practices through
the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education from the
Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL). Wikipedia-based
educational practices, which promote newcomers’ active engagement in the
encyclopedia, have been shown to support experiential learnings in critical
information literacy, communication and research outcomes, and social
justice. Exploring the connections between participation in Wikipedia and
transferable skills for information literacy in the context of the current
new media landscape, this presentation grapples with new questions for the
future of information literacies alongside the implications of large
language models (LLMs), systemic biases, and the representation and
inclusion of non-western and indigenous knowledge sources.
You can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Shshowcase
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase>
Best,
Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>