Wiki-research-l October 2008

wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org

23 participants
9 discussions

"Regular contributor"
by Ziko van Dijk 19 Nov '08

19 Nov '08

Hello, >From time to time I ask myself (and others) what is a "regular contributor" to a Wikipedia language edition. According to "Tell us about your Wikipedia" the definitions are quite different. At eo.WP I once checked a week long (in this August) who was making edits, and I calculated a "regular contributor" if someone * made at least one edit in that week * obviously speaks Esperanto (is no "foreign helper" like someone who does Interwiki linking) * made his first edit at least six months ago * made at least ten edits at all My result was: 71, compared to 141 "active users" and 50 "very active users" (Wikimedia Statistics, May 2008). What do you think about this definition? Kind regards Ziko van Dijk -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde

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"Regular contributor"
by Erik Zachte 18 Nov '08

18 Nov '08

> Statistics, with "Wikipedians", "active" and "very active users"; > like often, Zachte's Statistics are great, but easily misleading. Also keep in mind that most figures in wikistats still include bot edits. IMO it becomes more and more urgent to present separate counts for humans and bots. For instance in eo: 54% of total edits for all time were bot edits, but most of these will be from recent years, so the percentage will be even higher for recent years. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/BotActivityMatrix.htm Erik Zachte

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The survey is finally here
by Piotr Konieczny 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

After years of campaigning for a General User Survey, finally we get something similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SURVEY I am glad somebody didn't forget about copyright: "UNU-Merit will make anonymized research data available under the CC-BY license, and its own analysis under the CC-BY-SA license. Results will be publicized both on the Wikimedia blog and on the foundation-l mailing list." I am looking forward to the results, and I expect all of the readers of this listserv will fill in the survey :) Disclaimer: I am not associated with UNU-Merit and had and have nothing to do with this survey (but I tried to keep Meta:GUS alive and sympathize with the new survey). -- Piotr Konieczny "The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in theory."

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Project pageview statistics
by Erik Moeller 23 Oct '08

23 Oct '08

For those who haven't seen it, Erik Zachte has incorporated pageview statistics (based on Domas' data aggregation scripts, which are also used by stats.grok.se and others) into WikiStats. Related blog entry: http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/10/wikimedia-page-view-stats-i/ Example statistics for Wikipedia: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm Big thanks to Erik for these stats. :-) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Red links as stigmergy
by nsk 16 Oct '08

16 Oct '08

Diomidis Spinellis (author of the well-known book Code Reading) and Panagiotis Louridas, both of AUEB, published "the collaborative organization of knowledge: why Wikipedia's growth is sustainable" with DOI:10.1145/1378704.1378720 in CACM:51-8 (Aug 2008), http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1378704.1378720 The two researchers, whose project was partially funded by the European Commission, found that before an article is created it usually already has incoming links, in the form of [[red links]]. Most articles get written within a month after the first red link. Furthermore, incoming links increase exponentially until the article is written, thus making the links blue, at which time the increase becomes linear. Articles are usually created by a different Wikipedian than the contributor who inserted the first red link to it. I infer that Wikipedians use red links as a way to communicate with one another about which articles should be written first. The MediaWiki software also includes the MostWanted special page in which it counts how many incoming red links each article has. Wikipedia also has the [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] page. I regard the use of the red links for identifying articles most needed to be written as an example of communication through stigmergy in Wikipedia. I am, however, somewhat concerned about whether most Wikipedians prefer to get this information from the articles themselves or from the MostWanted MediaWiki/Wikipedia features, and whether this could affect the stigmergic nature of the communication. I feel that they probably get this information from the articles themselves spontaneously, and in that case it very much looks like stigmergy; but if they get the information from the centralised MostWanted page, is it still stigmergy? I would think yes, albeit the stigmergic nature of the communication may appear to be somewhat more weak than in the other case. What do other subscribers in the wiki-research-l mailing list think? -- Thanks, NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/

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Event: Semantic Wiki Meeting @ ISWC Karlsruhe: Sun Oct 26
by Christoph LANGE 16 Oct '08

16 Oct '08

Dear Wiki Researchers, a lot of not, new, emerging topics are being discussed in the Semantic Wiki community. Therefore, we are preparing an inofficial Birds-of-a-Feather Meeting of the Community on Sunday October 26th, after the conference workshops/tutorials during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Karlsruhe, Germany (the home of Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Wikipedia!) ... with ... * Lightning Talks (sign up to give one!) * Open Discussion Forum * Get-Together * and more; we appreciate your suggestions! Please visit http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemWiki_Meeting_ISWC_2008 and 1. let us know if you want to attend, and what your schedule for Sunday is 2. enter a lightning talk that you want to contribute 3. contribute anything else to this page, it's a wiki after all ;-) Looking forward to the meeting -- Cheers, Christoph PS: To learn more about hot semantic wiki topics, and particularly if you won't be able to join this physical meeting, please consider participating in http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_10_23 -- Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701

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Blog posts on improving English Wikipedia's Chinese topic articles
by Brianna Laugher 12 Oct '08

12 Oct '08

Hi, There are some interesting blog posts here, written by a Wikipedia editor: Living with Wikipedia: It's Here to Stay <http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/living-with-wikipedia-its-here-to-…> Part II, Improving Wikipedia: Technique and Strategy For China Folk <http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/part-ii-improving-wikipedia-techni…> cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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Using Wikipedia in schools
by Brianna Laugher 07 Oct '08

07 Oct '08

Hi, I recently gave a presentation at a teacher's conference about ways of using Wikipedia in the classroom, talking about different types of suitable projects. I will be giving it again to another teacher's conference in late November, but this time it will be in a computer lab, so it will be interactive. Flash slides + audio - <http://www.slideshare.net/pfctdayelise/safe-wiki-teaching-responsible-use-o…> Links and info - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Safe_wiki> I would appreciate any feedback people might have, especially if you can think of other types of Wikipedia classroom projects that might work, and also useful/cool history analysing tools that I might have missed. thanks, Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

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WikiScience announce
by Felipe Ortega 02 Oct '08

02 Oct '08

Hello. We would like to announce the release of WikiScience, an initiative to create a virtual space promoting interaction and interdisciplinary research among wiki researchers around the world. So far, we have only one tool online (a wiki to collect contributions, and organize ideas to further develop this initiative). In the following weeks we want to develop additional services to finally create a demo site with some useful functionalities to pursue our gobal objectives (annotated bibliography support, network of researchers, list of research tools and documentation, etc.). You can access the wiki at http://wikiscience.libresoft.es/wiki, and help us with your ideas and contributions. If you also want to collaborate in developing services for the new demo, please let us know too. Best regards, F.

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Wiki-research-l October 2008