Dear Wiki-research,
I'm starting to build the case here in Australia with some universities and
academic funding organisations that working with Wikipedia is a good and
important part of the educative role of an academic. I'm also conscious that
there are quite limited avenues for academics to be able to
professionally-justify the time they might devote to improving Wikipedia in
their relevant subject area. To that end, I'm beginning to float the idea of
a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. [Note,
this is not the same as most discussions on this mailing list which are
about studying Wikipedia itself]. So, as this list is made up of a high
proportion of academics who have a strong interest in Wikipedia I thought
I'd like to pass the idea pass you too.
I've written up a first pass at the proposal here:
http://www.wittylama.com/2009/09/wikipedia-journal/ (and it's been copied
into the Strategic planning wiki proposals here
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Journal ). There are obviously
many issues to sort out not the least of which is funding and scope. But,
I'd like your feedback on whether you think it a feasible/desirable way to
enable greater academic participation in Wikipedia. I.e. by giving added
incentives (naming rights, non-editability) and a more familiar format, but
at the same time increasing the quality of Wikipedia without having to
change its policies or practices. At the same time I hope it would increase
the perceived legitimacy of Wikipedia by demonstrating that we care about
their expertise and also increases awareness of what free-culture and
free-licensing is all about (because the details of the cc-by-sa license
would need to be explained to the authors).
Just a suggestion, and I thought the people on this list might be the kind
of people who might like to recruit their friendly neighbourhood professor
to write for the first edition! :-)
All the best,
-Liam [[witty lama]]
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
The Open Source Research group at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of
Erlangen-Nuremberg is seeking to hire recent graduates or experienced
software developers to start doctoral studies immediately. We have
several open positions.
The main research topic are open source software engineering processes,
practices, and tools. Examples of application domains of interest are
software forges (tools), business applications, medical technology,
mobile devices, and social software. Broader software engineering topics
with a tie-in to open source are also of interest. Research work will
typically require a combination of analytical and empirical work
combined with software development work. The university supports the
creation of startups from prior doctoral research work.
A prerequisite to starting Ph.D. studies in Germany are a German Diplom
or an M.S. degree from an accredited university, typically in a
technical field. Prior industry experience, or experience with open
source projects and/or agile methods is a plus.
Salary is competitive and the tri-city area of Nuernberg/Fuerth/Erlangen
is one of Germany's most beautiful and historic areas. Total population
is about one million inhabitants. You can live in the quaint and
family-oriented college town of Erlangen or in cosmopolitan Nuernberg
with its world-famous Christmas market or in historic Fuerth. See
Wikipedia for more details.
For more information, please see the department's home page at
http://www.cs.fau.de, the open source research group's home page at
http://osr.cs.fau.de, or the blog of Dirk Riehle at http://dirkriehle.com.
To apply, please send an email with your interests and a C.V. to the
group's leader, Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, at dirk.riehle(a)cs.fau.de.
Informal inquires are welcome too as well as declarations of interest to
start a Ph.D. studies at a later point in time.
If would like to stay up-to-date on the group's activities (open
positions, major research results, etc.), please subscribe to the
low-traffic announcements-only mailing list
http://groups.google.com/group/osr-announce.
--
Website: http://dirkriehle.com - Twitter: @dirkriehle
Ph (DE): +49-157-8153-4150 - Ph (US): +1-650-450-8550
I'm sure many of you caught the news
article(http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/) about
Adler and Alfaro's research(http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242572.1242608)
in wiki trustability being applied to live Wikipedia. It just so happens
that I have been working on a similar problem from a completely
different direction during my research and am ready to share this work
with the community. I have designed and implemented a user script
modification that I call HAPPI and am currently running a
non-profit/academic analysis of its usefulness. The script adds a
couple of new controls that will appear over the edit pane. These
controls will allow you to toggle the highlighting of wiki text while
you edit it. If you'd like to give it a try, please see the
documentation page and consent form for more information.
Screenshot: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/HAPPI_example.png
Documentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/HAPPI
Consent form: http://wikipedia.grouplens.org/HAPPI/consent
-Aaron Halfaker
Grouplens Research
University of Minnesota
On Friday 04 September 2009, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> Would it be possible for you to do a comparison with Wikipedia just
> before semiprotection was enabled? I've long wanted to know whether
> the argument that semiprotections would replace full protections holds
> any water.
>
> This would also seem to be quite important to know for flagged,
> inasmuch as that argument has been recycled for flagging pages...
I'm not a DB/server-tools whiz, so I just did my analysis from a wiki page to get a gloss and hopefully prompt someone who knows what they are doing to correct and extend it. My analysis was prompted because of all the discussion of flagging and I very much second your question and hope someone will step forth.
I'm also cc:ing wiki-research and will refer to my brief analysis [1] in the hopes that a DB/quant person would be interested in the question.
[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/protection-figures
