Dear WikiFriends,
I'm hoping you & yours are all well, safe and healthy in these
unprecedented times we have all found ourselves in.
I'm writing you today with my 'educator & researcher' hat on, with a
special request to help Piotr Konieczny & I spread the word about a new
global research we are conducting.
While using Wikimedia-related assignments (Wikipedia, Commons, WikiBooks,
WikiSource, Wikidata, Wiktionary etc) in the classroom has been used all
over the world for over a decade, very little research was conducted about
what instructors who have tried it actually think about the experience.
We are hoping that answering the questions in the survey will help us
better understand:
- Whether this teaching approach is effective (or not)
- What are some of the challenges experienced by instructors
- How the process could be improved
The questions are meant for any instructors running a wiki assignment,
whether it is in k-12 or higher education, formal or informal educational
setting. We are hoping the results will allow us to globally share
experiences and learn from one another, so we can make it smoother, easier
and more effective for educators joining these efforts.
It is important to note that this would be the first time (that we know
of!) that an academic research of this type has been conducted around the
world, so we really need your help in spreading the word about it in your
local communities. We're hoping that any of you, supporting such
initiatives around the world over the years, would forward it to your local
Education contacts and ask them to participate. The more instructors
participating, the better.
We realize that it would have been great to have the questionnaire in a
variety of languages, but in order for us to process the data properly and
not via third-party translations and keep the anonymity and privacy of
participants, it was decided to release the survey just in English.
Here is a link to the survey - https://tinyurl.com/yd6dfata
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fyd6dfata%3Ffbcli…>
.
Thank you all in advance, and of course, if there are any questions, Piotr
& I are here.
Stay healthy & safe!
Shani.
-----------------------------------------------
*Shani Evenstein Sigalov*
* Lecturer, Tel Aviv University.
* EdTech Innovation Strategist, NY/American Medical Program, Sackler School
of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.
* PhD Candidate, School of Education, Tel Aviv University.
* Azrieli Foundation Research Fellow.
* OER & Emerging Technologies Coordinator, UNESCO Chair
<https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495> on Technology, Internationalization
and Education, School of Education, Tel Aviv University
<https://education.tau.ac.il/node/3495>.
* Member of the Board of Trustees
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/shani-evenstein-sigalov/>, Wikimedia
Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>.
* Chairperson, The Hebrew Literature Digitization Society
<http://www.israelgives.org/amuta/580428621>.
* Chief Editor, Project Ben-Yehuda <http://benyehuda.org>.
+972-525640648
Dear Wikipedia Developers & Researchers,
My name is Ethan, and I am a researcher working under the supervision
of Prof.Haiyi
Zhu <https://haiyizhu.com/> in the HCI Department at Carnegie Mellon
University. We are looking for participants to test our visualization
system of ORES <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES>.
About our research
We are currently conducting a research study on Wikipedia's ORES system.
Our research focuses on building visualizations that help people
effectively understand ORES and build ORES-based applications.
About our study
If you have developed or used any ORES-based application, we would love to
invite you to participate in this research. The research will be a
think-aloud interview that takes approximately *45 minutes*. During the
research, we will ask you to interact with a visualization system we
developed for explaining aspects of the ORES models. We will also ask you
follow-up questions around your understanding of the visualization as well
as your thoughts on the AI models.
Compensation
All participants will be offered* $20 amazon gift cards*. If you are
interested in taking part in this research or would like more information,
please reply to this email.
I am looking forward to your response!
Best,
Ethan Ye
--
Zining(Ethan) Ye
Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design
Ziningy1(a)andrew.cmu.edu | 412-266-2205
<apologies for multiple posts>
PEER PRODUCTION AND OUR CRISES
Peer producers are people who create and manage common-pool resources together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons such as free and open source software and Wikipedia are non-rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non-excludable (no-one can prevent others from using them, through property rights for example). So, practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers”. We argue that peer production has a normative dimension so that what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). The Journal of Peer Production has tracked the evolution of peer production from open knowledge to open design and manufacturing. It approaches its ten-year anniversary in the time of the global pandemic, and of the continuing environmental crisis. The impacts of Covid-19 are profound, but will not last forever, though local infection pools may subsist in poorer countries for much longer than in the Global North. In contrast, the environmental crisis is here to stay.
THE ROLE OF THE JOURNAL OF PEER PRODUCTION
Significant social change is required to stave off climate destruction, and principles such as cooperation and trust, transparency in production, collective democratic decision-making, etc., can usefully contribute to necessary processes of “relocalization” and “degrowth”.* What should be done to develop the digital and physical commons? What role should the Journal of Peer Production play in this development? And what shape should it take? It is clear that in addition to maintaining its uniquely transparent curation and dissemination of academic research, the Journal of Peer Production needs to expand its work in several ways:
-Should it feature more practical advice to develop commons, such as toolkits and how-to guides?
-Should it comprise policy proposals to help grow the infrastructure which supports the commons?
-In other words, should it combine research and action?
The answer is "yes" in all three cases. To this end we seek creative, practical and policy-oriented ideas to help invent a new type of scientific journal that both fulfills strict academic criteria, and brings research work closer to practice. Our next issue, JOPP #15 will thus be a "TRANSITION" issue featuring, in addition to peer-reviewed research, experimental formats and "meta" articles.
JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Call for Papers
We seek investigations into societal transition (how can we move towards a society where contributions to the commons are valued and recognised?), into the journal's editorial transition (how should the Journal of Peer Production change to assist this societal transition), as well as idiosyncratic understandings of scientific and political transitions.
JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Peer-reviewed articles + Complement
We invite submissions of peer-reviewed academic papers from multiple fields on how "things can change". What are the sociological and historical conditions for transition to occur? For example: what is the impact of manifestos? When is innovation socialised? How can allies be enrolled? etc.
Editorial guidelines for peer-reviewed articles: max 8000 words; peer-reviewed in accordance with the JOPP peer review process
See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
For this TRANSITION issue, academic papers must be complemented by a shorter piece in which the contents of the academic paper are transformed into a different format. The nature of this transformation is up to the authors.
We can suggest the following: policy guidelines; practical toolkits; comic-books; etc.
Other authors may be enlisted to assist in the article's transition.
Editorial guidelines for complementary pieces: max 2000 words; reviewed by the editors.
JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Non peer-reviewed articles
We also invite submissions of non-peer reviewed academic papers dealing with transition. These will be reviewed by the editors.
A-Follow-up papers
Papers "following-up" on previous issues of JOPP, or on specific articles by the authors or others.
What has changed since this article was published?
B-Policy and strategic papers
Papers bringing together academics and policy makers.
Strategies for connecting to actors in government and/or civil society.
C-Meta papers
Papers on the question of impactful academic publishing: how can academics pursue a career and have social impact at the same time?
Papers on the transition of research fields: how do research fields evolve to better meet their aims?
Rewriting influential papers, or a chapter of a classic book, or revisiting one's own past paper: what has changed?
Editorial guidelines for A, B, and C: max 4000 words.
TRANSITION: TIMELINE
CFP released 30 June 2020
EOI peer-reviewed articles deadline (500-words max. extended abstract + 100-words max. complementary paper abstract) 30 July 2020
EOI non peer-reviewed articles deadline (250-words max. abstract) 30 July 2020
Authors advised 30 August 2020
First submission sent out for review 30 November 2020
Reviews due 30 January 2021
Revised submissions due 30 March 2021
Signals due 30 May 2021
JOPP # 15 released 30 June 2021
==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==
*The following is an excerpt from the final chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Peer Production (Wiley, 2021), “Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons” (O’Neil, Toupin, Pentzold):
The governance of peer produced projects, one of the central aspects of the studies of peer production, aspires to the self-regulation of participants in autonomous collectives. This governance raises the broader issue of political sovereignty. The appeal of self-governance for peer production participants can perhaps be explained by the amount of strategic control most citizens in liberal democracies have over their lives and environment. This control has been drastically reduced by unaccountable global actors – e.g. financial markets, extractive industrial interests, supranational trade agreements, and the list goes on – who influence and constrain the policy options of notionally democratic nation-states. In the early 2020s, racist nativism and authoritarianism are being embraced by some people in reaction to the failures of export-oriented, deregulated, and globalized neoliberalism. A way out of this political crisis is linked to a solution to the environmental crisis: we must head toward more democracy by relocalizing or deglobalizing, and towards more sustainability by degrowing, our economies.
As engaged researchers, we believe the Handbook of Peer Production needs to offer a response, however modest, to these political and ecological challenges. Addressing the macro-economic aspects of “deglobalization” would lead us far away from peer production, towards issues which would probably require a Handbook of their own. Accordingly, we focus here on relocalization as it relates to degrowth (décroissance), the downscaling of over-production and over-consumption (Kallis, 2019; Latouche, 2006). In a nutshell: unlimited growth and consumption are not sustainable, so we need more access to free public services, a shorter work week, and a turn towards climate-friendly industries. In this context, Stefania Barca (2019) suggests that the one question that matters is that posed by self-governing workers: “should surplus value be reinvested in production, or not”? Yet since only a handful of firms and industrial sectors are run following so-called “holacratic” (i.e., communal or participatory) principles, degrowth must – in a first stage at least – be deployed in a piecemeal, hybrid manner.
In the context of discussing the cooperative sector, Gibson-Graham (2003) suggest that if we perceive economic relations as already plural, then the revolutionary “project of replacement” can be modified into one of “strengthening already existing non-capitalist economic processes and building new non-capitalist enterprises,” of establishing “communal subjects” (p. 157). Several chapters in the Handbook of Peer Production [...] have discussed ways in which this “strengthening” has begun to occur at the municipal level. However, as noted by Adrian Smith (2014) in his account of London’s early-1980s Technology Networks (community-based workshops which provided open access to shared machine tools, technical advice, and prototyping services), a “key lesson from this history is that “radical aspirations invested in workshops, such as democratizing technology, will need to connect to wider social mobilizations capable of bringing about reinforcing political, economic and institutional change” (Smith, 2014, online). In other words, the ecology around peer production must be nurtured. Further, adopting strictly local settings leaves the public policy terrain open to neoliberal and/or reactionary perspectives.
References
Barca, S. (2019) The labor(s) of degrowth. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30(2), 207–216.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class. Critical Sociology. 29(2): 123-164.
Kallis, G. (2019) Socialism without growth. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30(2): 189-206.
Latouche, S. (2006) The globe downshifted. Le monde diplomatique. January.
https://mondediplo.com/2006/01/13degrowth
Smith, A. (2014) Technology Networks for socially useful production. Journal of Peer Production, 5: Shared Machine Shops. http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed…
Söderberg, J., & O’Neil, M. (2014). Introduction. In: Söderberg, J., & Maxigas (Eds.), Book of Peer Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press. http://peerproduction.net/projects/books/book-of-peer-production/
==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==
Hi all,
The Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation has officially started a new
Formal Collaboration
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Formal_collaborations>with
researchers from the Universidade Federal do Espirito (UFES, Brazil) and
Telefónica Research (Spain), to work collaboratively on the Exploration on
content propagation across Wikimedia projects
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Exploration_on_content_propagation….>
as part of the Knowledge Integrity program
<https://research.wikimedia.org/knowledge-integrity.html>.
Here are a few pieces of information about this collaboration that we would
like to share with you:
* We aim to keep the research documentation for this project in the
corresponding research page on meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Exploration_on_content_propagation….>
.
* Giovanni Comarela (UFES) and Souneil Park (Telefónica) will be
contributing to this project. We are thankful to them for agreeing to spend
their time and expertise on this project in the coming 3 months and to
those of you who have already worked with us as we were shaping the
proposal for this project and are planning to continue your contributions
to this program.
* I act as the point of contact for this research in the Wikimedia
Foundation. Please feel free to reach out to me (directly, if it cannot be
shared publicly) if you have comments or questions about the project.
Best,
Diego Sáez Trumper -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
Apologies for cross-posting
Over the last year, the DBpedia core team has consolidated great amount
of technology around DBpedia. This tutorial is targeted for developers
(in particular of DBpedia Chapters) that wish to learn how to replicate
local infrastructure such as loading and hosting an own SPARQL endpoint.
A core focus will also be the new DBpedia Stack, which contains several
dockerized applications that are automatically loading data from the
databus. The tutorial will cover the following topics:
- Using Databus collections (Download)
- Creating customized Databus collections
- Uploading data to the Databus
- Using collections in Databus-ready Docker applications
- Creating dockerized applications for the DBpedia Stack
The first tutorial will be held on July 1st, 2020 at 9:00-10:00 am
CEST.The tutorial will be repeated once more at a later time.
# Quick Facts
- Web URL:https://wiki.dbpedia.org/tutorials/1st-dbpedia-stack-tutorial
- When: July 1st, 2020 9:00-10:00 am CEST
- Where: The tutorial will be organized online. Registration is required
though.
- Databus: https://databus.dbpedia.org/
# Registration
Attending the DBpedia Stack tutorial is free. Registration is required
though. After the registration for the event, you will receive an email
with more instructions. Please register here to be part of the meeting:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfI3x5YE6bYmxTM57001MBfy5_1EjyjUV5…
# Program
- Please check the schedule for the upcoming DBpedia Stack Tutorial
here: https://wiki.dbpedia.org/tutorials/1st-dbpedia-stack-tutorial
# Organisation
- Milan Dojchinovski, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
- Jan Forberg, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
- Sebastian Hellmann, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
We are looking forward to meeting you online!
With kind regards,
The DBpedia Team
Hi all,
join the teams from Analytics and Research for their monthly office hours
next Wednesday, 2020-06-24 from 9.00-10.00am (UTC)*. Bring all your
research/analytics questions and ideas to discuss projects, data, analysis,
etc. To participate, please join the IRC channel: #wikimedia-research [1].
More detailed information can be found here [2].
Note the earlier starting time to previous meetings -- starting this month
we are experimenting with alternating time-slots from month to month to
provide different options for participation and accommodate a wider range
of timezones.
Looking forward to your participation,
Martin
[1] irc://chat.freenode.net:6667/wikimedia-research
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
* find local times here:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20200624T09
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi everyone,
We’re preparing for the June 2020 research newsletter and looking for contributors. Please take a look at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN202006 and add your name next to any paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication date is Target publication time is 28 June 15:59 UTC. If you can't make this deadline but would like to cover a particular paper in the subsequent issue, leave a note next to the paper's entry below. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews are most welcome.
Highlights from this month:
- Modeling Popularity and Reliability of Sources in Multilingual Wikipedia
- RuBQ: A Russian Dataset for Question Answering over Wikidata
- SchemaTree: Maximum-Likelihood Property Recommendation for Wikidata
- The effects of algorithmic flagging on fairness: quasi-experimental evidence from Wikipedia
- The impact of event type and geographical proximity on threat appraisal and emotional reactions to Wikipedia articles
- A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata, a case report
- A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia's High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic
- Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia
- COVID-19 research in Wikipedia
- Sudden Attention Shifts on Wikipedia Following COVID-19 Mobility Restrictions
- How do academic topics shift across altmetric sources? A case study of the research area of Big Data
- Language Models as FactCheckers?
- The impact of news exposure on collective attention in the United States during the 2016 Zika epidemic
- Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences
- Wikipedia in Vascular Surgery Medical Education: Comparative Study
Masssly and Tilman Bayer
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) | Twitter
Hi all,
I’m wondering if anybody here can help me - I'm looking for some sort of
tool that is able to get a batch of users (in this case, users who
participated in a Wiki Loves Monuments contest) and trace whether they are
still active or the date of the last time they used their account.
Does anybody have any suggestions, please?
Thanks!
Neville
--
Wikimedia Community Malta <http://www.wikimalta.org>
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, June 17, at
9:30 AM PDT/16:30 UTC.
In the era of 'information explosion,' we strive to stay informed and
relevant often too quickly, and hence run into the peril of consuming false
or distorted facts. This month, our invited speakers will help us
understand these dynamics, especially in the context of Wikipedia's content
and readership. First, Connie will talk about an initiative she's been
leading to source and rank credible information from the news, and its
overlap with Wikipedia. In the second talk, Tiziano will present his recent
work on quantifying and understanding how the readers of Wikipedia interact
with an article's citations to verify specific claims.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS9Jc3IFhVQ
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
This month's presentations:
Today’s News, Tomorrow’s Reference, and The Problem of Information
Reliability - An Introduction to NewsQ
By: Connie Moon Sehat, NewsQ, Hacks/Hackers
The effort to make Wikipedia more reliable is related to the larger
challenges facing the information ecosystem overall. These challenges
include the discovery of and accessibility to reliable news amid the
transformation of news distribution through platform and social media
products. Connie will present some of the challenges related to the ranking
and recommendation of news that are addressed by the NewsQ Initiative, a
collaboration between the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism
at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and Hacks/Hackers. In
addition, she’ll share some of the ways that the project intersects with
Wikipedia, such as supporting research around the US Perennial Sources list
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
).
Related resources
-
NewsQ Initiative site (https://newsq.net/)
-
DUE JUNE 15 (Please apply if interested!): Social Science Research
Council Call for Papers, “News Quality in the Platform Era”
https://www.ssrc.org/programs/component/media-democracy/news-quality-in-the…
-
M. Bhuiyan, A. Zhang, C. Sehat, T. Mitra, 2020. Investigating "Who" in
the Crowdsourcing of News Credibility, C+J 2020 (
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/express.northeastern.edu/dist/d/53/files/2020…
)
Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia
By: Tiziano Piccardi, EPFL
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is one of the
most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many
users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not a source of original
information, but was conceived as a gateway to secondary sources: according
to Wikipedia's guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that
reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at
the very heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with
them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging
all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to
cited references for one month and conducted the first analysis of readers'
interaction with citations on Wikipedia. We find that overall engagement
with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference
click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched
observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking
reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of
lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when
Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user.
Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources, and
references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc) are
particularly popular. Taken together, our findings open the door to a
deeper understanding of Wikipedia's role in a global information economy
where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more
vital.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08614
--
Janna Layton (she, her)
Administrative Assistant - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi all,
I was wondering what's the best way to get a mapping between Wikidata QIDs
and Google Knowledge Graph (ex-Freebase) MIDs.
We tried to extract the mapping from Wikidata, using the property
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P646, among others, but it doesn't
seem complete, with mappings for only 1.3 million entities -- much less
than the number of Wikidata entities.
Is there maybe a dedicated dataset or API for this mapping?
Alternatively, does anyone know of a way of querying the Google KG API [1]
directly with the name of a Wikipedia article (or with a Wikidata QID),
rather than an arbitrary plain-text string?
Thanks!
Bob
[1] https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph