Maybe not news, considering our traffic rankings.... but this is one
of the first "real" studies of Wikipedia use I've seen, conducted by
the prestigious Pew Internet project and released in April 2007 in a
"data memo".
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Wikipedia07.pdf
The first few paragraphs:
" More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the
citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new
nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on
a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted
Wikipedia.
There has been ongoing controversy about the reliability of articles
on Wikipedia. Still, the Pew Internet Project survey shows that
Wikipedia is far more popular among the well-educated than it is among
those with lower levels of education. For instance, 50% of those with
at least a college degree consult the site, compared with 22% of those
with a high school diploma.
And 46% of those age 18 and older who are current full- or part-time
students have used Wikipedia, compared with 36% of the overall
internet population.
In addition, young adults and broadband users have been among those
who are earlier adopters of Wikipedia. While 44% of those ages 18-29
use Wikipedia to look for information, just 29% of users age 50 and
older consult the site. In a similar split, 42% of home broadband
users look for information on Wikipedia, while just 26% of home
dial-up users do so."
Dear Wiki[media] researchers,
finally, SWiM, the semantic wiki for mathematical knowledge management, is
available for download. It is capable of editing, browsing, and presenting
mathematical knowledge represented in the structural semantic markup language
OMDoc (Open Mathematical Documents; see http://www.omdoc.org). Download it
at http://kwarc.info/projects/swim/, or test the demo at
http://raspberry.eecs.iu-bremen.de:8081/SWiM/. Recent news can be found on
the MathWeb wiki (http://mathweb.org/wiki/SWiM/), and for bug reports and
feature requests, please use our Trac site (http://trac.kwarc.info/swim/).
So far, version 0.1 of SWiM is available, based on IkeWiki 0.9.1, but with a
look and feel similar to MediaWiki -- except for a user-friendly text editor,
but that's why it is "0.1" ;-) To learn about the ideas behind the project,
please have a look at the technical report about SWiM
(http://kwarc.info/projects/swim/pubs/tr-swim.pdf). SWiM 0.1 serves as a
prototype to get feedback for the development of a collaborative platform for
managing general scientific knowledge exploited by various services, as
presented in more recent research papers (see
http://kwarc.info/projects/swim/pubs.html). You can soon expect a more
up-to-date SWiM 0.2 (based on IkeWiki 1.99, of course), with the first new
ideas of my Ph.D. proposal put into practice.
Best,
Christoph
--
Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, ICQ# 51191833
What would you do with a system that was intelligent enough to analyze a
Wikipedia article along with qualitative human judgments of that article
("brilliant prose") and tell you exactly what the humans meant, even when
they weren't sure themselves?
At least years Wikimania Erik Zachte and I discussed exactly this
possibility. Invariably these discussions lead to the subjective nature of
quality, and quickly diverge to [[Zen and the art of Motorcycle
Maintenance]]. But my colleagues and I have determined that this problem
should be tractable, and have initiated a research program to find out if we
are correct.
What we would like to know is your dreams for such a system, what you would
like it to do, and what you would do with it. To help kick-start your
imaginations, please see the following paper, written by myself, a
psychologist, Trevor Pincock, a linguist, and Laura Rassbach, a computer
scientist. Although we consider our findings to be preliminary, we would
also like to emphasize the phenomenal rate of growth of the field of
[[Natural Language Processing]]. We *will* be able to build the system of
your dreams. We just need to hear them first.
Please note that this paper is a draft. Please do not cite it.
"Exploring the Feasibility of Automatically Rating Online Article Quality"
http://whisper.colorado.edu/RassbachPincockMingus07.pdf
/Brian Mingus
en:User:Alterego <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alterego>
Dear wiki-researchers,
I am looking for historical articles-served rate for wikipedia. I know
that historical logs don't exist, but I'm looking for ballpack figures
on articles served per day (or whatever intervals available).
Any suggestions on where to look would be most welcome.
Many thanks,
Reid