Hello Everybody,
In the temporary silence after hot election and Wikipedia research Journal
debates and discussions (I hope at least the second one continues), I would
like to use the opportunity to introduce our new manuscript,
titled "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia
Activity Big Data" and available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0970.
There is also a rather fair review of this work at
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507076/now-wikipedia-used-to-predict-m…
.
As always, comments, critics, encouragements, etc, are most welcome (if you
are shy, please write me off-list).
Bests,
Taha Yasseri
Dr. Taha Yasseri.
---------------------------------------------
www.phy.bme.hu/~yasseri <http://www.phy.bme.hu/%7Eyasseri>
Department of Theoretical Physics
Institute of Physics
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Budafoki út 8.
H-1111 Budapest, Hungary
tel: +36 1 463 4110
fax: +36 1 463 3567
---------------------------------------------
Hi all;
I wonder if there are unaffiliated researchers in this mailing list. I know
that publishing without affiliation is a bit hard, so I would like to talk
with them and learn from their experience.
Regards,
emijrp
--
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada
http://LibreFind.org - The wiki search engine
>... 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.
I would like to see an honest comparison of, for example, the reported
benefits of in-person conferences compared to their social and
economic costs. Meeting people in person is valuable, but I think it
happens more often than it needs to in most fields. Until people get
serious about organizing workflow around teleconferencing, huge and
expensive inefficiencies will persist. People love deductible junkets,
but where is the cost-benefit analysis?
Dear colleagues,
Last week I attended the parisian Open Access week main event that was
held at the Unesco. I evoked briefly the migntable project of a Wiki
Research Journal that was discussed in september (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas
). It was received with a good deal of enthusiasm, both from
scientists and from Unesco representatives.
So far, this concept seems very likely to materialize : only a bit of
publicity could sufficed to attract several high-quality submissions.
Three issues remain, nevertheless to be solved :
*Technical issue : we probably need a specific wiki. Whereas not
highly sophisticated, it should perhaps include some reading functions
in order to make the journal main content easy to read and to refer to.
*Scientific issue : the journal requires rather a broad and definite
general thematic, in order to receive diverse and, yet, coherent
submissions. Perhaps a focus on epistemological topics (open access…)
or communication topics (wiki-system and so on…) could deem
appropriate, as it would allow to go beyond disciplinary barriers.
*Financial issue : a small grant from the WMF would be enough to
start. As the journal is to rely on volunteer work, all we have to do
is to ensure the technical bare necessities.
PCL
Hi Tilman,
Could you explain the logic behind the survey link not being static until
the user completes the survey or dismisses the notice?
I appreciate that you're offering, via email, to give people the survey
link if they missed it, but that will influence who ends up your survey
population. Not everyone on your target population is subscribed to a list
whetr this offer has been made.
John Vandenberg.
sent from Galaxy Note
On Oct 31, 2012 7:26 AM, "Tilman Bayer" <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> we have just launched the Foundation's 2012 editor survey; with
> invitations to participate being shown to logged-in users on Wikipedia
> and Commons.
>
> A few quick facts about the survey (for more refer to
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012
> ):
>
> * This is the third survey of editors as envisaged in the Foundation's
> 2010-15 strategic plan "in order to take the pulse of the community
> and identify pressing issues or concerns", after the April 2011 and
> December 2011 surveys.
>
> * The first main purpose of this survey is to continue the work of the
> 2011 studies (conducted by Mani Pande and Ayush Khanna), with a focus
> on tracking changes since last year and identifying trends.
> Which is why many questions are being repeated from last time.
>
> * The second emphasis in this instance of the survey is to measure the
> satisfaction of the editing community with the work of the Wikimedia
> Foundation.
>
> * This is the first editor survey that includes a non-Wikipedia
> project (Commons, for the questions that are non Wikipedia-specific).
>
> * Thanks to everyone who commented on the draft questionnaire after we
> solicited feedback on this list and in and IRC office hour, as well as
> to those who commented about the last survey. We made several changes
> based on the feedback, and tried to reply to all concerns.
>
> * Also many thanks to all volunteer translators who reviewed or
> contributed translations; the questionnaire is available in 14
> languages (Italian, Polish and Portuguese will launch a bit later).
>
> * As with the previous two surveys, the results will be published in
> the following forms: A "topline" report detailing the percentage of
> responses for each question, a series of posts on
> https://blog.wikimedia.org analyzing the results, and a data set
> consisting of anonymized responses which others can use to do their
> own analyses. This time we will also aim to produce language-specific
> topline reports (an approach we already tested for Chinese with the
> data from the December 2011 survey).
>
> --
> Tilman Bayer
> Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
> Wikimedia Foundation
> IRC (Freenode): HaeB
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>
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
https://github.com/embr/userstats
"We're pleased to release version 0.1.0 of the userstats Python library
and command-line tool for computing user-centric metrics on Wikipedia
users. The goal of the software is to make it easy for project owners to
track the contributions and status of users involved in their project.
It is also intended to be easily extensible so that custom metrics can
be added using only a few lines of Python code."
>From the "Global Learning and Grantmaking" section of the September WMF
report:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/31/wikimedia-foundation-report-september…
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
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