Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, June 17, at 9:30 AM PDT/16:30 UTC.
In the era of 'information explosion,' we strive to stay informed and relevant often too quickly, and hence run into the peril of consuming false or distorted facts. This month, our invited speakers will help us understand these dynamics, especially in the context of Wikipedia's content and readership. First, Connie will talk about an initiative she's been leading to source and rank credible information from the news, and its overlap with Wikipedia. In the second talk, Tiziano will present his recent work on quantifying and understanding how the readers of Wikipedia interact with an article's citations to verify specific claims.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS9Jc3IFhVQ
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:
Today’s News, Tomorrow’s Reference, and The Problem of Information Reliability - An Introduction to NewsQ
By: Connie Moon Sehat, NewsQ, Hacks/Hackers
The effort to make Wikipedia more reliable is related to the larger challenges facing the information ecosystem overall. These challenges include the discovery of and accessibility to reliable news amid the transformation of news distribution through platform and social media products. Connie will present some of the challenges related to the ranking and recommendation of news that are addressed by the NewsQ Initiative, a collaboration between the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and Hacks/Hackers. In addition, she’ll share some of the ways that the project intersects with Wikipedia, such as supporting research around the US Perennial Sources list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources).
Related resources
NewsQ Initiative site (https://newsq.net/)
DUE JUNE 15 (Please apply if interested!): Social Science Research Council Call for Papers, “News Quality in the Platform Era” https://www.ssrc.org/programs/component/media-democracy/news-quality-in-the-platform-era/
M. Bhuiyan, A. Zhang, C. Sehat, T. Mitra, 2020. Investigating "Who" in the Crowdsourcing of News Credibility, C+J 2020 (https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/express.northeastern.edu/dist/d/53/files/2020/02/CJ_2020_paper_32.pdf)
Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia
By: Tiziano Piccardi, EPFL
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not a source of original information, but was conceived as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at the very heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references for one month and conducted the first analysis of readers' interaction with citations on Wikipedia. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources, and references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc) are particularly popular. Taken together, our findings open the door to a deeper understanding of Wikipedia's role in a global information economy where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more vital.
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