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
Hi!
I am doing a PhD on online civic participation project
(e-participation). Within my research, I have carried out a user
survey, where I asked how many people ever edited/created a page on a
Wiki. Now I would like to compare the results with the overall rate of
wiki editing/creation on country level.
I've found some country-level statistics on Wikipedia Statistics (e.g.
3,000 editors of Wikipedia articles in Italy) but data for UK and
France are not available since Wikipedia provides statistics by
languages, not by countries. I'm thus looking for statistics on UK and
France (but am also interested in alternative ways of measuring wiki
editing/creation in Sweden and Italy).
I would be grateful for any tips!
Sunny regards, Alina
--
Alina ÖSTLING
PhD Candidate
European University Institute
www.eui.eu
Hi all;
I'm starting a new project, a wiki search engine. It uses MediaWiki,
Semantic MediaWiki and other minor extensions, and some tricky templates
and bots.
I remember Wikia Search and how it failed. It had the mini-article thingy
for the introduction, and then a lot of links compiled by a crawler. Also
something similar to a social network.
My project idea (which still needs a cool name) is different. Althought it
uses an introduction and images copied from Wikipedia, and some links from
the "External links" sections, it is only a start. The purpose is that
community adds, removes and orders the results for each term, and creates
redirects for similar terms to avoid duplicates.
Why this? I think that Google PageRank isn't enough. It is frequently
abused by farmlinks, SEOs and other people trying to put their websites
above.
Search "Shakira" in Google for example. You see 1) Official site, 2)
Wikipedia 3) Twitter 4) Facebook, then some videos, some news, some images,
Myspace. It wastes 3 or more results in obvious nice sites (WP, TW, FB).
The wiki search engine puts these sites in the top, and an introduction and
related terms, leaving all the space below to not so obvious but
interesting websites. Also, if you search for "semantic queries" like
"right-wing newspapers" in Google, you won't find real newspapers but
"people and sites discussing about ring-wing newspapers". Or latex and
LaTeX being shown in the same results pages. These issues can be resolved
with disambiguation result pages.
How we choose which results are above or below? The rules are not fully
designed yet, but we can put official sites in the first place, then .gov
or .edu domains which are important ones, and later unofficial websites,
blogs, giving priority to local language, etc. And reaching consensus.
We can control aggresive spam with spam blacklists, semi-protect or protect
highly visible pages, and use bots or tools to check changes.
It obviously has a CC BY-SA license and results can be exported. I think
that this approach is the opposite to Google today.
For weird queries like "Albert Einstein birthplace" we can redirect to the
most obvious results page (in this case Albert Einstein) using a hand-made
redirect or by software (some little change in MediaWiki).
You can check a pretty alpha version here http://www.todogratix.es (only
Spanish by now sorry) which I'm feeding with some bots.
I think that it is an interesting experiment. I'm open to your questions
and feedback.
Regards,
emijrp
--
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> |
StatMediaWiki<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es>
| WikiEvidens <http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> |
WikiPapers<http://wikipapers.referata.com>
| WikiTeam <http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/>
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
I was the one who raised the 1812 example in the context of
Wikipedia's coverage of military history; see Richard Jensen,
"Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the
War of 1812," ''The Journal of Military History'' 76#4 (October
2012): 523-556; the page proofs (with some typos) are online at
http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/JMH1812.PDF
My argument is that Wikipedia is written by and for the benefit of a
few thousand editors -- what the readers or the general public wants
or thinks or uses is largely irrelevant.
The growth then depends on the need to recruit new editors --
using the details from the 1812 article I suggest that fewer and
fewer new editors are actually interested. (I also looked at other
major articles on WWI, WWII, the American Civil War & others and
found the same pattern.)
Look at it demographically: apart from teenage boys coming of age,
the population of computer-literate people who are ignorant of
Wikipedia is very small indeed in 2012. That was not true in 2005
when lots of editors joined up and did a lot of work on important articles.
So I think that military history at Wikipedia is pretty well
saturated. That does not mean there are not more possible topics (we
have about 130,000 articles (including stubs) now and major libraries
will own maybe 100,000+ full length books on military topics). I
suggest that new editors need to have an attractive new niche that is
not now well covered. I suggest that they will have a very hard time
finding such a niche that allows for the excitement of new writing
about important topics. (such as took place in back in
2005-2007). Personally I greatly enjoyed writing about George
Washington and Ulysses Grant and Napoleon--that's why I'm here. I
would have trouble explaining to someone why they should write up
general #1001, #1002, #1103 ... let alone colonel #10,001, 10,002, 10,003 ....
Richard Jensen
User:Rjensen email rjensen(a)uic.edu
Would anyone have/know where to find any of the following estimates for
English Wikipedia, either as a number or as % of the total population of
editors (which is known):
* of people who edited Wikipedia anonymously
* of Wikipedians with a userpage
* of Wikipedians who have been registered for less than a year
* of Wikipedians who have been registered for less than a month
The data does not have to be current.
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
Dear colleagues,
My paper "Wikipedia. Between lay participation and elite knowledge
representation" has just been published at Information, Communication &
Society.
I´d be interested in your thoughts. Contact me if you don´t have access
to that journal.
Best,
René
Abstract
The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges
traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about
whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if
existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on
Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of
the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on
insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are
conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using
grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11
attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous
alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that
fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge
authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these
views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the
role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge
construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate
‘what actually happened’ and which knowledges should be represented in
the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the
discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by
marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the
article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously
excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert
authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to
a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted
established hierarchies.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2012.734319
---
René König, Dipl.-Soz.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS)
P.O. Box 3640
76021 Karlsruhe
Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 721 / 608-22209
Web/Skype: renekoenig.eu
Twitter: r_koenig
We have a new article in The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/surmounting-the-insur…
(which btw I found following Dario's twitter, @ReaderMeter, which I
recommend)
and this is still the same story of whether we achieved the limit of
what can be written etc). Without going into details of this animated
debate (I have smth to say, for instance, I just created two articles
which have about a hundred red links, and the material to fill in these
red links is available, but this will lead us away from the topic), I am
curious, if anybody ever tried to estimate what is the possible number
of notable topics for articles. On the short time scale, it should grow
linearly with time, since we have new sports events, elections, TW
shows, movies, books etc, and many persons who previously not been
notable become notable. Thus, this number must be
N = a + b (t-2012),
where a is the number of topics notable now, t is the time in years,
and b is the number of new topics which become notable every year.
Was there any research on what order of magnitude a and b have? I guess
b must be in the order of dozens of thousands, since we are talking
about people. What is a? Is it dominated by the number of species of
insects, or cosmic bodies, or what?
I tried to ask this question several years ago in Russian Wikipedia,
but there was no concluding answer.
Cheers
Yaroslav
We've released a full, anonymized dump of article ratings (aka AFTv4) collected over 1 year since the deployment of the tool on the entire English Wikipedia (July 22, 2011 - July 22, 2012).
http://thedatahub.org/en/dataset/wikipedia-article-ratings
The dataset (which includes 11m unique article ratings along 4 dimensions) is licensed under CC0 and supersedes the partial dumps originally hosted on the dumps server. Real-time AFTv4 data remains available as usual via the toolserver. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about this data.
Dario