Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, October
19, 2016 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 (UTC).
Link for remote presenters to join the Hangout on Air:
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#October_2016>.
YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBImUZ_si5s
This month's showcase includes.
Human centered design for using and editing structured data in Wikipedia
infoboxesBy *Charlie Kritschmar
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Charlie_Kritschmar_(WMDE)> UX
Intern, Wikimedia Deutschland
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland>*Wikidata is a
Wikimedia project which stores structured data to be used by other
Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia. Currently, integrating its data in
Wikipedia is difficult for users, since there’s no predefined way to do so
and requires some technical knowledge. To tackle these issues,
human-centered design methods were applied to find needs from which
solutions were generated and evaluated with the help of the community. The
concept may serve as a basis which may be implemented into various Wiki
projects in the future to make editing Wikidata from within another
Wikimedia project more user-friendly and improve the project’s acceptance
in the community.
Emergent Work in WikipediaBy *Ofer Arazy
<http://oferarazy.com/> (University of Haifa)*Online production communities
present an exciting opportunity for investigating novel organizational
forms. Extant theoretical accounts of knowledge co-production point to
organizational policies, norms, and communication as key mechanisms
enabling the coordination of work. Yet, in practice participants in
initiatives such as Wikipedia are often occasional contributors who are
unaware of community policies and do not communicate with other members.
How then is work coordinated and how does the organization maintain
stability in the face of dynamics in individuals’ task enactment? In this
study we develop a conceptualization of emergent roles - the prototypical
activity patterns that organically emerge from individuals’ spontaneous
actions – and investigate the temporal dynamics of emergent role behaviors.
Conducing a multi-level large-scale empirical study stretching over a
decade, we tracked co-production of a thousand Wikipedia articles, logging
two hundred thousand distinct participants and seven hundred thousand
co-production activities. Using a combination of manual tagging and machine
learning, we annotated each activity type, and then clustered participants’
activity profiles to arrive at seven prototypical emergent roles. Our
analysis shows that participants’ behavior is turbulent, with substantial
flow in and out of co-production work and across roles. Our findings at the
organizational level, however, show that work is organized around a highly
stable set of emergent roles, despite the absence of traditional
stabilizing mechanisms such as pre-defined work procedures or role
expectations. We conceptualize this dualism in emergent work as “Turbulent
Stability”. Further analyses suggest that co-production is
artifact-centric, where contributors mutually adjust according to the
artifact’s changing needs. Our study advances the theoretical
understandings of self-organizing knowledge co-production and particularly
the nature of emergent roles.
Hope to see you there!
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org