Hi all,
The April 2025 Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday,
April 16, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1744821000>. Our theme this month is
*Motivation
of Wikipedia Editors*.
*We invite you to watch via the YouTube
stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/vl0DpsfnPXY
<https://youtube.com/live/vl0DpsfnPXY?feature=share>.* As always, you can
join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
Our presentations this month:
Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized
Field Experiment on WikipediaBy *Yan Chen (University of Michigan)*We
conducted a large-scale personalized field experiment to examine how match
quality, recognition, and social impact influence domain experts'
contributions to Wikipedia. Forty-five percent of the experts expressed
willingness to contribute in the baseline condition, while 51% (a 13\%
increase over the baseline) expressed interest when they received a signal
that an article matched their expertise. However, none of the treatments
had a significant effect on actual contributions. Greater actual match
quality between a recommended Wikipedia article and an expert's expertise,
measured by cosine similarity, an expert's reputation and the Wikipedia
article length, were the most important predictors of both contribution
length and quality. These findings suggest that match quality between
volunteers and tasks is critically important in encouraging contributions
to digital public goods, and likely to volunteering in general.
Quantitative Analysis of Zambian Wikipedia Contributions: Assessing
Awareness, Willingness, Motivation, and the Impact of Gamified Leaderboards
and BadgesBy *Lighton Phiri (University of Zambia)*Wikipedia is a widely
recognized and valuable source of information, However, it encounters
persistent challenges in attracting and retaining active contributors. It
is recorded that only 10 people from Zambia contribute and create content
on wikipedia in the month of may 2023. While a large number consumes
Wikipedia content, there is a noticeably low number of Wikipedians that
contribute content on and about Zambia. This paper presents a Facebook
plugin, WikiMotivate, aimed at motivating Zambian Wikipedians to update
pre-existing content, add new entries, and share their natural expertise.
WikiMotivate was implemented as a Facebook plugin that utilizes leaderboard
and badge gamification features to encourage and incentivize active
Wikipedia content contribution. Using a mixed-methods approach, historical
Wikipedia edit histories were used to quantify content contributed by
Zambian Wikipedians. In addition, user surveys were conducted to determine
relative levels of awareness about Wikipedia, willingness to contribute
content on Wikipedia and perceived motivating factors that affect content
contribution on Wikipedia. Furthermore, a Facebook plugin, WikiMotivate,
was implemented in order to be used as a service for motivating potential
Zambian Wikipedians. Finally, in order to determine the most effective
approach, a comparative analysis of leader-boards and badges was conducted
with nine (9) expert evaluators. The results clearly indicate that a
significant proportion of Wikipedia content on and about Zambia is authored
by Wikipedians from outside Zambia, with only 11% of the contributors, out
of the 224, originating from Zambia. In addition, study participants were
largely unaware of the various editing practices on Wikipedia;
interestingly enough, most participants expressed their willingness to
contribute content if trained. In terms of motivating factors, “Information
Seeking and Educational Fulfillment” was the key motivating factor. The
Facebook plugin implemented suggests that incorporating leaderboards and
badges is a more effective approach to motivating contributions to
Wikipedia. This study provides useful insight into the landscape of
Wikipedia content contribution in the Global South.
[1] https://unza.zm [2] https://datalab.unza.zm [3] https://emi.org.zm
Best,
Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
*Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*
Good morning data folks,
This morning we migrate our webrequest dataset to feed from HAProxy instead
of Varnish.
The expected differences are documented in this google doc
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cCSGzLUfVWUHjqG5v5VdLADsbzmMklczQ1YG7og…>,
as well as the detailed analysis and the migration plan.
We expect to be done in a few hours, in the meantime you may experience
failing queries if you use the webrequest data, and new data will not be
flowing until we are done.
For those interested in following the operation, we'll post on slack in this
thread <https://wikimedia.slack.com/archives/C05RHK7PS6Q/p1743494545802669>.
We'll post here again at the end of the operation.
Thank you for your understanding :)
--
Joseph Allemandou (joal) (he / him)
Staff Data Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation