Wiki-research-l August 2010

wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org

25 participants
17 discussions

Wikipedia Research policy
by song＠cs.umn.edu 14 Jul '23

14 Jul '23

Pursuant to prior discussions about the need for a research policy on Wikipedia, WikiProject Research is drafting a policy regarding the recruitment of Wikipedia users to participate in studies. At this time, we have a proposed policy, and an accompanying group that would facilitate recruitment of subjects in much the same way that the Bot Approvals Group approves bots. The policy proposal can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research The Subject Recruitment Approvals Group mentioned in the proposal is being described at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group Before we move forward with seeking approval from the Wikipedia community, we would like additional input about the proposal, and would welcome additional help improving it. Also, please consider participating in WikiProject Research at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Research -- Bryan Song GroupLens Research University of Minnesota

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Research Committee launched
by Erik Moeller 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Hello all, I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Wikimedia Foundation research committee, with 11 initial members. You can find more information and bios here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee The purpose of the committee is to help organize policies, practices and priorities around Wikimedia-related research. Thanks to everyone who applied to join the committee. We're using a publicly archived mailing list as our primary means of communication, if you're interested in following what's going on: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l We'll also begin working on the pages on meta.wikimedia.org to make them more useful, and we'll have a first IRC meeting soon. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Raw data on the Pending Changes trial
by Rob Lanphier 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Hi everyone, As you are probably aware, English Wikipedia is in the process of evaluating the Pending Changes trial [1]. As a result, we've done some work to provide data to help assist the evaluation of the process. First the raw data. Here's a single .csv containing all of the edits: http://robla.net/2010/wmf/PendingChangesIndividualEdits-2010-08-10.csv.bz2 ..and a series of individual per-article csvs: http://robla.net/2010/wmf/PendingChangesIndividualEdits-2010-08-10.zip These were processed into more readable forms and posted to enwiki. The full processed stats are available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Metrics/Full_table We picked out the most interesting columns for analysis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Metrics/Anonymous_ed… Finally, we did a little analysis, and posted it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Metrics/Preliminary_… The scripts we used to pull all of this together are located here: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/tools/analysis/ We thought you all would be interested in this data, hence the posting here. Let us know if you slice/dice the data some other way and discover something interesting. Thanks! Rob [1] Pending changes trial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes

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top hosts in external links
by Jodi Schneider 25 Aug '10

25 Aug '10

Ed Summers has done some nice analysis of the top hosts referenced in article space, based on SQL dumps: http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/08/25/top-hosts-referenced-in-wikipedia-pa… People with more in-depth knowledge might make something of this -- for instance the importance of bots in external links, or the prevalence of certain types of information. For instance, why/where/how is edwardbetts.com used? (doesn't seem to be postcode data, which was my first guess) See also his linkypedia code: http://github.com/edsu/linkypedia -Jodi

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Two Wikimedia Foundation research analyst jobs
by Erik Moeller 25 Aug '10

25 Aug '10

Dear Wikimedia research community, I want to bring to your attention two full-time staff positions with the Wikimedia Foundation that we're currently hiring for: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Senior_Research_Analyst_-_… http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Senior_Research_Analyst_-_… These two have a slightly different focus. The strategy position, reporting to me, is closely linked to Wikimedia's product development roadmap (translating research findings into product decisions), and has an overall coordinating function. The Global Development position, reporting to the Chief Global Development Officer, Barry Newstead, directly supports our work in expanding Wikimedia's presence and programmatic activities world-wide, with special focus on disadvantaged and underrepresented communities. For the strategy role, I'd love to get someone with existing deep Wikimedia experience (as a researcher and/or editor), even if they don't meet the exact requirements in the JD. These jobs are based in San Francisco, California, so if you're not based in the SF Bay Area, let us know if you're willing to relocate. Please see the postings above for further information, and please help get the word out in your communities. These positions are separate from the volunteer research committee (although of course these staff positions are expected to interface with the r-com), and you should feel free to apply for these positions even if you've already applied to be on the r-com. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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request for comment on research proposal testing mediawiki discussion interfaces (LiquidThreads & Reflect)
by Travis Kriplean 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

Greetings! I'm a computer science researcher at the University of Washington. In the past few years, I've done a number of studies examining e.g. deliberation on wikipedia through policy use and the division of valued work through barnstars. I've recently designed and built a new discussion interface for improving web based discussions called Reflect (http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/travis/reflect/). Jonathan Morgan presented it at Wikimania this year (http://www.slideshare.net/jtmorgan/wikimania-reflect). We're now trying to run a study to see how well it works and get insight into the next steps we take in its design. At the same time, we'd like to help Wikimedia gain insight into the development of LiquidThreads. We are proposing to run a study with the cooperation of Wikimedia. The study proposal is outlined here: http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~travis/liquidreflection/index.php/Discus… We would love to get your input, particularly on the talk page: http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~travis/liquidreflection/index.php/Talk:D… LiquidThreads + Reflect is implemented on that talk page, as well as the in-situ survey methodology described in the proposal. Jonathan has seeded the talk page with some discussion topics. Thank you for your consideration!!! Cheers, Travis

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New mailing list: newprojects
by Casey Brown 22 Aug '10

22 Aug '10

It seems that no one actually announced the creation of the "newprojects" mailing list yet! The mailing list[1] is an announcement-only list for new Wikimedia wikis[2]. The way it works is that the addwiki.php[3] script that sysadmins use to create the wikis automatically sends a mail to the list, so (provided there are no bugs with the script) subscribers will get an e-mail when every Wikimedia wiki is created. This list should be especially useful for people who need to know when new wikis are created so that they can update their tools or scripts. Of course, people who are just interested in knowing about new wikis are welcomed to subscribe too. :-) [1]https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/newprojects [2]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix [3]http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Add_a_wiki -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023

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Polish and Russian vandalism revert tags
by Felipe Ortega 21 Aug '10

21 Aug '10

Hello, all. After receiving the feedback from our presentation of the status of Flagged-Revision study in Wikimania 2010, we now need some help from the community to finalize this challenging project. Our purpose is to compare the patters we have identified for vandalism revertion in GE Wikipedia with 2 other communities also using Flagged-Revisions, namely Polish and Russian Wikipedias. So, we would need: * If there exist a list of well-known tags added to the comments field whenever a revert is performed in any of these 2 editions. * If so, a list of matching words or tags we should look for using regexps to identify such reverts. * Any other useful hints (like tags that show up frequently but whose meaning could change depending on subsequent words). Any comment tag identifying a revert is useful, but we're mainly focused on vandalism revert. That's also why we are not currently using the MD5 hash approach (we do need to differentiate among different types of reverts, not only detect them). Please, forward this message to any relevant mailing list where local wikimedians contributing to these languages could help us. You can answer to the list, or directly to this email account. Thanks in advance. Felipe.

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Demo of RC-Events over XMPP
by Daniel Kinzler 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

(I sent this to a couple of lists already, but i though it might also be interresting for the research community) Hi all! For a long time I wanted a decent push interface for RecentChanges-Events, so it becomes easy to follow changes on a wiki. Parsing messages on IRC is unreliable, and polling the API sucks (and is also unreliable, see Bug 24782). So, I have written XMLRC <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC> and set up a prototype on the Toolserver - have a look at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Recentchanges_via_XMPP> for details. Basically, you point any Jabber client to the chat room <enwiki(a)conference.jabber.toolserver.org> to see the change events, like on IRC. However, if you use a client aware of the extra data attached to the messages, like <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC/rcclient.py>, you will get all the information you can get from the API (in fact, you can get the exact same XML tag). Try it out and let me know what you think! -- daniel

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Web 2.0 recent changes patrol tool demo (WPCVN)
by Dmitry Chichkov 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

Some time ago as a Python/Django/JQuery/pywikipedia exercise I've hacked a web based recent changes patrol tool. An alpha version can be seen at the: http://www.wpcvn.com It includes a few interesting features that may be useful to the community (& researchers designing similar tools): 1. tool uses editors ratings, primarily based on user counters (includes reverted revisions counters) calculated using the wiki dump; 2. site members can see each other reviewing; 3. site members can see edits being reverted (with ratings of the reverting editor); 4. site members can confirm their nicknames (bind to the account on the Wikipedia, the tool can catch/identify a GUID in the edit comment to WP:SANDBOX); 5. can aggregate IRC feeds from bots (currently only MiszaBot is supported). WPCVN yet another collaborative *(it shows other users actions - patrols and reverts)* Web 2.0 RC patrol tool that runs in a browser. It has been tested with Firefox <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox>, IE<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE>and Google Chrome <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome>. Currently operates for en-wiki only in the alpha <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_testing> mode. WPCVN aggregates recent changes IRC feed, IRC feed from the MiszaBot and WPCVN user actions. It also uses pre-calculated Wikipedia users "karma" (based on the recent en-wiki dump analysis) to separate edits made by users with clearly good or bad reputation. The tool is open source (LGPL) and uses JQuery/JQueryUI + Django backend. -- Regards, Dmitry

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Wiki-research-l August 2010