OKFN Labs just released a lightweight JS library to pull machine-readable data on Wikipedia articles from DBPedia
http://okfnlabs.org/wikipediajs/
Dario
Hello Everybody,
Few days ago, we have submitted a manuscript, reviewing some of our recent
work + comparisons to others + some new results.
A pre-print is at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5130
The aim of the paper is to provide a mini review especially for those ones
who are not very familiar with the field. However, the paper is clearly
biased in coverage in favour of our topics of interest and also mentioning
only those papers that I come across! Since the first characteristic, being
limited in topical coverage, is fine, the second one, potential missing of
related papers should be cured as much as possible.
That would be highly appreciated if you could give me feedbacks of any
kind, especially on the missing literatures.
Cheers,
.Taha Yasseri
THANKS to WSC
Those are good points -- I have a few days to make edits to the page
proofs; the article will appear in Oct 2012 J Military History.
Comments: I have not seen any editor make actual use of the Article
Feedback tool -- are there examples? Yes Wikipedians are very proud
of their vast half-billion-person audience. However they do not ask
"what features are most useful for a high school student or teacher/
a university student/ etc"
As for who does the work, I looked closely at the big military
articles especially 1812, & also WWI, WW2, Am Civil War, Am
Revolution and found that the occasional editors & IP's contributed
very little useful content. That is also my experience with the
political articles on presidents & prime ministers & main political parties.
Boasting like Mike Fink?-- well I read 500+ requests for access to
Questia, Highbeam etc. and looked for what boasts editors actually
make. As for higher degrees and scholarly publications, that does not
cut much mustard on talk pages. Very few editors -- maybe 2%--mention
their professional expertise on their user pages. Fewer than 1% give
real names that would permit validation of their claims. in Academe
these rates would be 99%
In a larger sense (but it's not in my article), perhaps there are two
wiki communities, one for law enforcement & one for content. That is,
we have vigilantes policing the encyclopedia and ranchers herding
ideas and moving them to market. (I would use the farmer metaphor but
growing a new crop sounds too much like OR). The cash market,
however, consists of praise from other ranchers (as in FA), not from
the half-billion customers whose opinion about the beef is not of interest.
At 05:59 PM 9/5/2012, you wrote:
>Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few things, though its
>possible that some may simply be that you are writing in American English.
>
>
>"The article itself runs 14,000 words" - suggest "The article itself
>runs to 14,000 words"
>
>"That perspective is not of much concern inside Wikipedia, for it is
>operated by and for the benefit of the editors.i Only readers who
>write comments are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand
>comments." That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns
>that we don't know enough as to what our readers want, however one
>of the primary motives of most editors that I know is to make
>humanity's knowledge freely available to the world,
><http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_…>http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_…
>and I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the
>number of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more
>readers such as getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own
>later comment "
>Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened up a very
>large, new audience" being a typical Wikipedian sentiment. Neither
>of which accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its
>editors. If you've found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's
>academic critics it might be worth balancing that with information
>on the readership survey
><http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey
>and the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find
>out what our readers want. I suspect that such criticisms also
>pre-date developments such as the Article Feedback tool.
>
>
>"That task is handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in
>practice means a self-selected group of a couple thousand editors."
>As well as adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most
>of the vandal fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam
>deletion is done a relatively small community of a few thousand. But
>the people who add content are an overlapping and rather larger
>group. How you measure the size of the community is complex, and
>many people ignore the IP editors who actually write a large part of
>the content and focus on the currently active editors who have done
>over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400 or so that group isn't
>far from being a couple of thousand.
><http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm>http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
>But it is much larger when you consider the number of people who
>have contributed content in the past but may be less active now. Our
>2,000 most active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little
>over a year ago,
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_t…>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_t…
>but even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits
>such as typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: "That
>task is handled by the "Wikipedia community," which in practice
>means a self-selected group of a few thousand frequent editors and a
>much larger number of occasional participants.
>
>
>"Wikipedia editors almost never claim authorship of published
>scholarly books and articles. That sort of expertise is not welcome
>in Wikipedia; editors rarely mention they possess advanced training
>or degrees" According to the editor survey 26% of our editors have
>either a masters or a PhD. Academic expertise is highly valued in
>Wikipedia, but it is best demonstrated by the quality of ones edits
>and especially your sourcing. Afterall most of our editors are here
>to share their
>expertise
><http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_…>http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_…
>
>
>
>"Wikipedia editors will boast like river boatmen about their output:
>how many years they have worked on the encyclopedia, how many tens
>or hundreds of thousands of edits they have made." There is some
>truth in that, but in terms of status within the community featured
>article contributions are a higher value currency than either tenure
>or edit count.
>
>
>"They do not gain by selling their product, and anyone suspected of
>writing articles for pay on behalf public relations for an entity
>comes under deep suspicion.i As a result how many people read an
>article, or how its audience has grown or fallen, or how useful it
>has been to the general public are not among the criteria used to
>evaluate quality." That's an interesting synthesis, there certainly
>is a distrust of those who edit for pay, especially if they are from
>the PR industry. But I would suggest that the distrust is more a
>product of people's experience with editors who have difficulty
>writing neutrally about topics that they are being paid to promote.
>A couple of good contrasts were mentioned in the translation
>sessions at Wikimania in Gdansk in 2010, Google and its charity arm
>Google org both presented about paid editing they'd commissioned in
>Indic languages. The uncontentious operation was done by the charity
>arm, translating English Wikipedia articles on medical articles into
>various south Asian Wikipedia versions. Rather more contentious was
>the commercial part of Google, they created missing articles for
>their most common search terms, this lead to criticism from at least
>one editor that they were writing an encyclopaedia and didn't need
>articles on Hollywood stars. But the criticism
>
>
>
>
>"The Wikipedia community uses kangaroo courts where the accused are
>brought before a self-constituted jury, operating without formal
>rules or defense counsel." That isn't too bad a description of the
>RFC process but ARBCOM is elected, and for things that don't reach
>Arbcom, only admins can block other editors and admins are not
>simply self selected.
>
>
>"I taught military history but he never wrote on the war of 1812,
>and usually skipped over it in my lectures."
>- Suggest dropping the word "he"
>
>
>"That is a handful of established editors strongly resist any new
>additions." Suggest "That is when a handful of established editors
>strongly resist any new additions."
>
>"The Military History Project is one of the largest and most
>energetic of these. It enrolls over 700 editors and is coordinated
>by Dank and a dozen volunteers who ride heard on 51,000 different
>articles. " I'm pretty sure it is the biggest WikiProject, and would
>suggest herd not heard.
>
>"The problem is less severe in military history because academia
>does not favor the field and much of the next writing is done by
>self-trained scholars." next seems odd, best or new sound a little
>more plausible to me - but both would be guesses.
>
>
>"My recommendation for improving military history on Wikipedia is to
>set up a program to help the most active military editors gain
>better access to published scholarship, gain an appreciation of the
>historiography, and start attending military history conferences."
>You might be interested in some of our GLAM outreach work, thus far
>I think that the military museums have been under-represented, but
>in London Wikimedia UK recently ran this:
><http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-…>http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-…
>
>
>"Germany has a strong chapter that handles the German language
>Wikipedia." I think you'll find that the Austrians and Swiss also
>get involved in DE wiki affairs, I suspect that there are several
>other languages where a chapter more closely aligns with a language.
>English of course has the UK, Australian and and Indian chapters as
>well as the three North American ones and many editors not covered
>by a chapter.
>
>On a broader note, you might want to look through the logs for War
>of 1812
><http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+of+1812>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+of+1812
>It was first semi protected briefly in February 2006, was open for
>anyone to edit for most of 06 and 07, but with a few short gaps has
>been semi protected continually since 2010. There are very few
>articles that have been semi protected for as long, and much if not
>all of its subsequent reduced editing level will be from that. Semi
>Protection is known to sharply reduce editing. There is also a
>theory that people are reluctant to edit articles that have gone
>beyond their expertise, and this article will clearly be beyond the
>expertise of many.
>
>Regards
>
>WSC
>
>On 5 September 2012 18:52, Richard Jensen
><<mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:
>I have an essay that has just been accepted by the Journal of
>Military History on
>Military History on the Electronic Frontier:
>Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812
>
>It deals with the history of the "War of 1812" article on Wikipedia,
>in context of military history and how Wikipedia operates.
>
><http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx>http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx
>
>I would welcome any feedback.
>
>Richard Jensen
><mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjensen(a)uic.edu
>User:Rjensen
>
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>
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Good day everyone
My name is Hrafn Malmquist, I am an Icelandic student of library and
information science at the University of Iceland, writing a master's thesis
on the Icelandic Wikipedia (http://is.wikipedia.org) which I have
personally actively contributed to for about six years
(http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notandi:Jabbi). It has currently 34,478
articles and a very active user base of probably less than 30 users. My
approach is wholistic, recounting the general history of Wikipedia, the
Icelandic Wikipedia, the statistical development and possibly conduct
interviews with contributing users.
Any pointers on interesting research - especially with regard to small
language communities - would be well appriciated.
In searching for sources on the general history of Wikipedia, the best
overview I found is Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Revolution). I find it to be
interesting but incomplete and rather sloppy when it comes to citing
sources. He should have finished it off with more care. Does anyone know of
a better alternative?
Best regards, Hrafn
I am a brand new Master's student at Purdue. For my Social Network Analysis
class, I'm thinking about doing a project about whether a Wikipedian's
centrality in a network can be used as a predictor of future participation.
I've spent the afternoon looking for relevant literature. I found the very
interesting
"Validity Issues in the Use of Social Network Analysis with Digital Trace
Data" by Howison, Wiggins, and Crowston
and
"Network analysis of collaboration structure in Wikipedia" by Brandes et al.
I'm wondering if there are other papers about how to translate Wikipedia
into a network structure, or even more specifically relating to node-level
centrality measures and participation measures.
Very many thanks,
Jeremy Foote
