Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, November 20,
2019, at 9:30 AM PST/17:30 UTC. We’ll have a presentation from Martin
Potthast of Leipzig University on text reuse in Wikipedia and other
presentation from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Isaac Johnson on the
demographics and interests of Wikipedia’s readers.
YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIko_V1k09s
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:
Wikipedia Text Reuse: Within and Without
By Martin Potthast, Leipzig University
We study text reuse related to Wikipedia at scale by compiling the first
corpus of text reuse cases within Wikipedia as well as without (i.e., reuse
of Wikipedia text in a sample of the Common Crawl). To discover reuse
beyond verbatim copy and paste, we employ state-of-the-art text reuse
detection technology, scaling it for the first time to process the entire
Wikipedia as part of a distributed retrieval pipeline. We further report on
a pilot analysis of the 100 million reuse cases inside, and the 1.6 million
reuse cases outside Wikipedia that we discovered. Text reuse inside
Wikipedia gives rise to new tasks such as article template induction,
fixing quality flaws, or complementing Wikipedia’s ontology. Text reuse
outside Wikipedia yields a tangible metric for the emerging field of
quantifying Wikipedia’s influence on the web. To foster future research
into these tasks, and for reproducibility’s sake, the Wikipedia text reuse
corpus and the retrieval pipeline are made freely available. Paper
<https://webis.de/publications.html#?q=wikipedia%20ecir%202019>, Demo
<https://demo.webis.de/wikipedia-text-reuse/>
Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Demographics and Interests
By Isaac Johnson, Wikimedia Foundation
Building on two past surveys on the motivation and needs of Wikipedia
readers (Why We Read Wikipedia
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#November_2016>; Why
the World Reads Wikipedia
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018>),
we examine the relationship between Wikipedia reader demographics and their
interests and needs. Specifically, we run surveys in thirteen different
languages that ask readers three questions about their motivation for
reading Wikipedia (motivation, needs, and familiarity) and five questions
about their demographics (age, gender, education, locale, and native
language). We link these survey results with the respondents' reading
sessions -- i.e. sequence of Wikipedia page views -- to gain a more
fine-grained understanding of how a reader's context relates to their
activity on Wikipedia. We find that readers have a diversity of backgrounds
but that the high-level needs of readers do not correlate strongly with
individual demographics. We also find, however, that there are
relationships between demographics and specific topic interests that are
consistent across many cultures and languages. This work provides insights
into the reach of various Wikipedia language editions and the relationship
between content or contributor gaps and reader gaps. See the meta page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Reader_Surveys>
for more details.
--
Janna Layton (she, her)
Administrative Assistant - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>