Hi Dorothy,
On data visualizations you and your friend may find good pieces to view at: http://seealso.hatnote.com/ It's a "collection of visualization projects built on Wikipedia datahttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data, curated by Hatnote http://blog.hatnote.com/."
An interesting study, in my opinion, with initial thoughts (around 2004) on how can we study the movement is: *Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource - http://www.ufrgs.br/limc/participativo/pdf/wikipedia.pdf http://www.ufrgs.br/limc/participativo/pdf/wikipedia.pdf * That's is what I remember by now, I am also interested on propose/test such metrics (mostly quantitative ones) and study it further.
Best regards, Jonas