Wiki Loves monuments was a multinational photography contest run last
September with the aim of getting photos of monuments for Wikimedia
Commons. The participant survey has been published here
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013/Partici…
Interestingly whilst the participants are strongly skewed to men, women are
a much larger minority than amongst wikipedia editors.
Regards
Jonathan
There is a readership survey being proposed on the English Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/English_Wikiped…
have been joining in the discussion but seem to be participating more
as
a community member than as a Research committee member so neutral eyes
would be welcome.
Jonathan
Hi Han-Tseng, if you or any researchers have ideas as to how to extend
glamourous or any of Magnus's tools it is worth asking him, If it sounds
interesting to code he might well take the challenge.
I have no idea what "fair" would look like in E coverage, but "unfair" is
sometimes easily spotted. My own interests are strongly skewed towards
archaeology, so I would tend to cover Egypt or Iraq very differently from
someone interested in football or the military. A map of the world's
stained glass windows according to coverage on Wikimedia Commons would come
up with huge skew towards England.
Slightly more surprisingly if anyone were to check the home range of
species using Wikimedia Commons they would discover that Llamas and Alpacas
also are obviously English -
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Llamas_and_alpacas_in_Englandbei…
so dominant within
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Lama Though there is an
alternative theory that volunteer photographers are biased towards that
which is unusual for them.
Things get rather more serious, contentious and sometimes down right murky
when you start looking at the cultural patrimony of areas that have had a
bloody even genocidal past. There are parts of the world where the record
even a century ago shows a different local culture than that which now
prevails. I'm currently in the Caucasus where there are several cultures
that each tend to take their natural cultural area from whatever their
nation's maximum historical borders were, and that's before arguments as to
which iron age or bronze age culture is the ancestor of which modern people.
But I agree that we could and should identify gaps and try to fill them,
this is something that I hope to contribute to in my new role as wikimedia
UK's GLAM organiser. The UK has a huge legacy of global culture acquired
during our days of empire, and it seems to me that the least we can do is
make sure that digital info is made available to the source countries and
cultures.
As for how this could correlate to research opportunities on Commons, I
can see some interesting ones, for starters how long does it take better
quality newer images on commons to supplant older lower resolution images
in their usage in Wikipedia articles and elsewhere?
Then of course there is the usual Commons minefield around depictions of
human nudity. A tiny proportion of Commons images that have generated a
very high proportion of the meta level discussion within the movement,
especially betweenCommons and its detractors. I think that would make for
an interesting study into cultural conflict on the web.
Regards
Jonathan
On 30 April 2013 04:14, Han-Teng Liao <hanteng(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for sharing the great tool k
> https://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php! I am also interested in
> the geo-linguistic distribution and diffusion of online content. Thus,
> while I agree with your assessment that legal barrier and digital divide
> distribution may "distort" the geographic distribution, I am not sure what
> counts as "fair" distribution. UK has been having a huge online presence
> and internet infrastructure advantage for various reasons. It is difficult
> to have a fair distributive "justice" based on counting land masses. Land
> masses can be a source of distortion as well<http://network.nature.com/groups/scivis/forum/topics/3451>.
> ;-) I would rather use this as "distorted" outcome to advocate for more
> commons-friendly practices from cultural institutions, particularly from
> East Asia.
>
> Also, is it difficult to expand your current tool to generate stats on the
> language descriptions available? A simple research idea is to see how
> languages play a role in importing/exporting Wikicommons materials. I used
> toolserver for my previous research on interlanguage links before. Thus,
> any collaboration on the toolserver (as opposed to making it available
> online) might be an option.
>
> (I reply this email as private email first, and if you find the questions
> and/or your replies to them are relevant to the mailing list, feel free to
> reply it to the list as well)
>
> Best,
> han-teng liao
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:37 AM, WereSpielChequers <
> werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If there has been any research it is likely to be out of date. Wikimedia
>> Commons is probably our fastest growing major project - it has grown by a
>> fifth in just the last 8 months. Last August it had only 14 million files
>> and has gained 2.8 million since then.
>>
>> The contents are much more skewed to mass imports from elsewhere than
>> Wikipedia is, and as those mass imports happen so they change the average
>> composition of the wiki.
>>
>> Another big influence is national legislation, we probably have far more
>> images from countries which have freedom of panorama laws that are
>> compatible with commons than from countries that don't have such
>> laws.Another factor is historical, countries that have systematically
>> replaced old monuments may have less to take pictures of. Hence Commons has
>> a massive skew towards the UK which has 0.1% of the world's landmass, 1% of
>> its population but rather more than 10% of Commons files. I've uploaded
>> quite a few UK images myself, and I have hundreds of images of Georgia that
>> I can't upload to Commons but can upload to other image sharing sites.
>>
>> If you are considering research by useage you might find it useful to
>> check https://toolserver.org/~magnus/glamorous.php
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>>
>>
>> On 29 April 2013 19:59, emijrp <emijrp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It is very interesting but very little has been researched
>>> http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons
>>>
>>> The same with other sister projects (Wiktionary, wikibooks,
>>> wikisource...).
>>>
>>> Research is highly biased towards Wikipedia. Neither other wikifarms
>>> have been studied.
>>>
>>>
>>> 2013/4/29 Heather Ford <hfordsa(a)gmail.com>
>>>
>>>> Does anyone know of research on images on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance!
>>>>
>>>> Best,
>>>> heather.
>>>>
>>>> Heather Ford
>>>> Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Programme
>>>> www.ethnographymatters.net
>>>> @hfordsa on Twitter
>>>> http://hblog.org
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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