Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, November
20, at 9:30 AM PST / 17:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1732123800>. The theme for this showcase is
*A Look at External Factors that Help Different Language Versions of
Wikipedia Thrive*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/oH0PCNIzF0E. As usual, you can join the
conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentations:
The social embeddedness of peer production: A comparative qualitative
analysis of three Indian language Wikipedia editionsBy *Sejal Khatri*Why do
some peer production projects do a better job at engaging potential
contributors than others? We address this question by comparing three
Indian language Wikipedias, namely, Malayalam, Marathi, and Kannada. We
found that although the three projects share goals, technological
infrastructure, and a similar set of challenges, Malayalam Wikipedia’s
community engages language speakers in contributing at a much higher rate
than the others. Drawing from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with
18 community participants from the three projects, we found that experience
with participatory governance and free/open-source software in the
Malayalam community supported high engagement of contributors.
Counterintuitively, we found that financial resources intended to increase
participation in the Marathi and Kannada communities hindered the growth of
these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of social and
cultural context in the trajectories of peer production
communities.Low-Resource
Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding StudyBy *Hellina
Hailu Nigatu, UC Berkeley*Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like
Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about
themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with
low-resourced languages—including most African communities—the quality and
volume of content available are often inadequate. One reason for this lack
of adequate content could be that many OKRs embody Western ways of
knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many low-resourced language
communities to adapt to new interactions. In this talk, we will go through
findings from two studies: (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum
discussions and (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors
who create content in low-resourced languages. We will focus on three
Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis
revealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to
find resources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages,
and language technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck,
result in several errors that waste contributors’ time. Based on our
analysis, we will also outline design opportunities for building better
language support tools and interfaces for low-resourced language speakers.
Best,Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>