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
> 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
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."
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/
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
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/
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.