After a break in September, we’re resuming our monthly Research and Data showcase. The next showcase will be live-streamed tomorrow Wednesday October 15 at 11.30 PT. As usual you can join the conversation via IRC on freenode.net by joining the #wikimedia-research channel.
We look forward to seeing you there,
Dario
This month:
Emotions under Discussion: Gender, Status and Communication in Wikipedia By David Laniado: I will present a large-scale analysis of emotional expression and communication style of editors in Wikipedia discussions. The talk will focus especially on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the about 12000 editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. The analysis is based on three different predefined lexicon-based methods for quantifying emotions: ANEW, LIWC and SentiStrength. The results unveil significant differences in the emotional expression and communication style of editors according to their status and gender, and can help to address issues such as gender gap and editor stagnation.
Wikipedia as a socio-technical system By Aaron Halfaker: Wikipedia is a socio-technical system. In this presentation, I'll explain how the integration of human collective behavior ("social") and information technology ("technical") has lead to a phenomena that, while being massively productive, is poorly understood due to lack of precedence. Based on my work in this area, I'll describe five critical functions that healthy, Wikipedia-like socio-technical systems must serve in order to continue to function: allocation, regulation, quality control, community management and reflection. Next I'll argue the Wikimedia Foundation's analytics strategy currently focuses on outcomes related to a relatively narrow aspect of system health and all but completely ignores productivity. Finally, I'll conclude with an overview of three classes of new projects that should provide critical opportunities to both practically and academically understand the maintenance of Wikipedia's socio-technical fitness.