Hi Everyone,

The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, September 20, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR5JwqyVGSk

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#September_2017.

This month's presentation:

A Glimpse into BabelAn Analysis of Multilinguality in WikidataBy *Lucie-Aimée Kaffee*Multilinguality is an important topic for knowledge bases, especially Wikidata, that was build to serve the multilingual requirements of an international community. Its labels are the way for humans to interact with the data. In this talk, we explore the state of languages in Wikidata as of now, especially in regard to its ontology, and the relationship to Wikipedia. Furthermore, we set the multilinguality of Wikidata in the context of the real world by comparing it to the distribution of native speakers. We find an existing language maldistribution, which is less urgent in the ontology, and promising results for future improvements. An outlook on how users interact with languages on Wikidata will be given.

Science is Shaped by WikipediaEvidence from a Randomized Control TrialBy *Neil C. Thompson and Douglas Hanley*As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it is not surprising that Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge. However, Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in the world, including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the potential to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways: correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally through a randomized experiment where we added new scientific content to Wikipedia. We find that fully a third of the correlational relationship is causal, implying that Wikipedia has a strong shaping effect on science. Our findings speak not only to the influence of Wikipedia, but more broadly to the influence of repositories of scientific knowledge. The results suggest that increased provision of information in accessible repositories is a very cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains are equity-improving, disproportionately benefitting those without traditional access to scientific information.

Many kind regards,

Sarah R. Rodlund Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation srodlund@wikimedia.org