List-defined references (WP:LDR) involve reducing the amount of code
dedicated to references in the main body, by moving most of it to the
bottom of the article (here's an example of a diff that showcases how
this works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_Wide_Web&diff=prev&oldid=52…).
Wiki policies and community are currently divided on whether this is a
good idea or not. I'd think that reducing the amount of wiki code in the
main body of text is a good idea, as it makes the text less code-heavy,
thus friendlier (a step towards WYSWIG), which should make editing more
easy for all editors, particularly the newbies whom I'd expect be most
likely to be scared by the code. However, I was asked for a proof of
that, and hence I wonder if anybody knows any studies that would be
relevant to this discussion?
On a related note, LDR reformatting of an article does tend to increase
the article size by about 10%. Is there any research on how an increase
in article size affects page load times, and editing window lag?
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
Hi,
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any research on Wikimedia meetups and the
effects on editor retention?
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
--
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
Hi all,
Are there any solid estimates out there of how many Google [or other]
searches have a Wikipedia article as the first [or second or third...]
hit? Any language breakdowns of this would be super cool as well.
I've seen offhand references to this phenomenon in many papers, but
I'm wondering if someone on this list knows of a particularly good
estimate or reliable information.
thanks,
Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
We are writing an article on Wikipedia's coverage of historiography
and need some basic scripting help capturing a subset of articles and
querying them for a set of words, dates of sources, and the like. Is
there anyone here who could help us or anyone who comes highly
recommended? Thanks!
Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) and Adrianne Wadewitz (User:Wadewitz)
--
Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz
Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow
Center for Digital Learning + Research
Occidental College
http://www.oxy.edu/center-digital-learning-research/abouthttps://sites.google.com/site/wadewitz/
User:Arided added the following to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas
> The field of "wiki studies" exists but there is no dedicated journal.
This is a problem to be solved.
There is an academic/industry "wiki studies" conference called WikiSym.
Also, there is Wikimania, a more wiki-like, less academic conference for
wiki studies and technologies.
Why do we also need a wiki journal? What needs would such a journal
fulfill that the conferences do not?
To state it plainly, why do we need yet another publication venue specific
to wiki software?
-Aaron
Kerry Raymond: "A really exciting result would be the ability to predict
stock price movements from WP editing behaviour!"
I am actually funded by a project where we are trying that. We have
looked a bit on Twitter sentiment (like everyone else is doing), but now
also do Wikipedia sentiment analysis for companies.
You see an example here for the Lundbeck pharmaceutical company:
http://rb.imm.dtu.dk/base/c/Lundbeck
The plots are for Wikipedia sentiment through time, Twitter sentiment
through time and stock price (plots not aligned temporally).
Lundbeck had bad publicity last year. One of their drugs was, without
their acceptance, used for executions in United States. There is a drop
in Twitter sentiment in regard to that issue -- and also a slight drop
in Wikipedia sentiment. It is unclear to me whether the stock price
movement is related to that media issue.
I have not completed the analysis. But you see some further companies
here http://rb.imm.dtu.dk/base/c/ Mostly it is only the Swedish and
Danish companies I have run through the sentiment analysis.
Finn Årup Nielsen
Hi everyone,
I am interested into counting the number of revisions every page went
through. I was wondering if it is possible to count that without using the
whole history dump. I mean is it available in the schema directly? Is
it computable without having the revisions text downloaded?
Moreover, many of my future projects will benefit a lot if Wikipedia has
incremental dumps of their database. Any one aware of something relevant or
close?
Regards.
--
Rami Al-Rfou'
Dear all,
Hope you are all well.
I'm writing to check whether any of you have already had access to public
opinion researches on the Portuguese Wikipedia.
I've found and read a lot of researches about editorship, consensus X
controversies, content management analyses, as well as governance of
Wikipedia. However, I've been struggling to find any record of any
quantitative research regarding credibility, trust or perception among
users of the Portuguese Wikipedia.
I've been working on the Brazil Catalyst Program and would love to see
studies on that.
If you ever saw any research or study related to that, I would be grateful
if you could share with me.
Thank you so much,
best
Oona
There has been a lot of talk about how to start a journal. The real
issue in starting a journal is not the editorial board, or the way it
is published, or whether it will gather the citation impact. The real
issue is READERSHIP.
If you can get people to read the journal, then it will have editors
wanting to serve the journal, and it will gather citation impact.
The reason why WikiSym is changing is for the same reason. People are
not going to the conference! I think the attendance has been below
100 for some time now. That's not a sustainable number for the amount
of work that goes into organizing a conference.
---------------
Ed H. Chi, Staff Research Scientist, Google
CHI2012 Technical Program co-chair
On Thursday, November 8, 2012, Kerry Raymond wrote:
> I agree, the movie distributors and the movie theatre owners can
> probably benefit from one month out predictions. ****
>
>
> Taking this on a tangent... Some of the research being done on Wikipedia
and related projects has commercial value. It isn't necessarily in terms
of direction monetary gain as a result of having links placed on Wikipedia
articles or people read about something on Wikipedia and make a purchasing
decision they might not otherwise. How does this match with English
Wikipedia's culture at times that eschews an hint of commercial interests,
and possible benefits to any organisation? How do academics working in
this space deal with any such conflicts? Especially when many papers have
recommendation sections or ideas on further research which could be seen as
supporting such work?
The reason I ask is I am doing research through my university for an
external government body. The opportunity to do research came up because
of my thesis topic and recognition that the work I was doing on Wikipedia
was valuable in terms of freely sharing information. I've never been paid
to edit, but my research references my own editing work and has
recommendations about engagement. (Donate pictures. Host meetups and
editing workshops. Recognise Wikinews media accreditation. Invite Commons
photographers to events like you would other media. Make information more
freely available on your own site.) I've been advised that this is a good
academic path to take given the interest in the space and the lack of
research available in it.
I don't think this is particularly controversial. My own research suggests
marketers are generally telling companies to leave Wikipedia alone as the
ROI is not worth it. (Bad press is not good press in this instance.) My
own research has also suggested there are no direct monetary benefits to
editing: organisations do not convert citation clickthroughs to parts of
their site where they can get money off them either through sales or
through donations that would make the time, effort and possible controversy
worthwhile.
How does the balance go? How do other academics writing about these things
manage if they are active contributors?
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
--
mobile: 0412183663
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com