Hi everyone,
Can expressions of gratitude make online communities stronger and more
inclusive? Or does thanking others for their voluntary efforts have little
effect?
CAT Lab <https://citizensandtech.org/> has partnered with Arabic, German,
Persian and Polish language Wikipedias to answer those questions - and more
- in two new studies.
In a field experiment that organized experienced Wikipedians to thank
thousands of editors
<https://citizensandtech.org/2020/06/effects-of-saying-thanks-on-wikipedia/>,
we found that *receiving a Thanks increased two week retention by 2
percentage points* on average. Receiving thanks also causes recipients to
send 43% more thanks on average (preprint <https://osf.io/dmwef/>).
A partner study looked at the effects on senders of giving Thanks
<https://citizensandtech.org/2020/06/mentoring-thanking-and-burnout-wikipedi…>.
While we did not find an effect, this could be because *many** volunteers
already felt emotionally drained from their efforts on Wikipedia and
weren't able to complete the study*. Because of this, we made valuable
discoveries about who spends time supporting others, how they think about
the intentions of newcomers, and how they feel about their work. We also
gained insights into Wikipedians who consider themselves "mentors" and
"monitors" (preprint <https://osf.io/m9cy6/>).
We value feedback and discussion as we move our pre-prints toward
submission for publication.
-----
Our team of Julia Kamin, Max Klein, Eric Pennington, and I are tremendously
grateful to the many Wikipedians who partnered with us in this work, in
particular our eight liaisons who worked closely with us in the design of
the studies, including Reem Al-Kashif, Christine Domgörgen, Mohamed
ElGohary, Maria Heuschkel, Amir Ladsgroup, Wojciech Pędzich, Mohsen Salek,
and Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska.
Conducting Collaborative Field Experiments with Wikipedia Communities
This research was done in collaboration with language Wikipedias and
reviewed by two university ethics boards. We hope that this research
inspires more participatory research that is co-created by Wikipedia
communities.
In the next year, we are working to open our process & software to a wider
range of communities and researchers. Toward that end, CAT Lab is currently
developing ideas and fundraising for our next round of collaborations,
building on our workshops and community research summit
<https://citizensandtech.org/2019/11/research-summit-with-wikimedians/> in
Stockholm last year. If you have ideas, please reach out!
--
J. Nathan Matias <http://natematias.com/> : Cornell University : Citizens
and Technology Lab <https://citizensandtech.org> : @natematias
<http://twitter.com/natematias> : blog
<https://natematias.com/external-posts/>
The June 2020 issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter is out:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2020/June
In this issue:
1 Facebook research about automated Wikipedia-based fact-checking using language models2 How Wikipedia keeps up with COVID-19 research3 Briefly4 Other recent publications4.1 "A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia's High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic"4.2 COVID-19 mobility restrictions increased interest in health and entertainment topics on Wikipedia4.3 "Collective response to the media coverage of COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia"4.4 "A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata, a case report"4.5 "Swat: A system for detecting salient Wikipedia entities in texts"4.6 "WAC: A Corpus of Wikipedia Conversations for Online Abuse Detection"4.7 "Multi-class Multilingual Classification of Wikipedia Articles Using Extended Named Entity Tag Set"4.8 "Computational Fact Validation from Knowledge Graph using Structured and Unstructured Information"
*** 11 recent publications were covered or listed in this issue ***
Masssly and Tilman Bayer
---
Wikimedia Research Newsletter
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/
* Follow us on Twitter: @WikiResearch
* Like us on Facebook: Facebook.com/WikiResearch/
* Receive this newsletter by mail: Research-newsletter Mailing List - Wikimedia
Apologies for cross-posting. Please share widely!
Giovanni
******************** CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS ********************
2nd Conference on Truth and Trust Online (TTO)
TTO 2020
Virtual, October 16-17, 2020
https://truthandtrustonline.com/
****************************************************************
The mission of the Conference on Truth and Trust Online (TTO),
now in its second edition, is to bring together all parties
working toward improving the truthfulness and trustworthiness
of online communications. Given the ongoing travel restrictions,
this year’s conference will be virtual, taking place online on
October 16-17, 2020.
We invite submissions of both technical papers and talk proposals
on technical solutions for addressing current challenges facing
social media platforms on the following indicative list of topics:
- Misinformation
- Disinformation
- Trustworthiness of COVID-19 news and guidance
- Hate speech
- Online harassment and cyberbullying
- Credibility
- Hyper-partisanship and bias
- Image/video verification
- Fake amplification
- Fake reviews
- Polarization and echo chambers
- Transparency in content and source moderation
- Privacy requirements
DEADLINES:
- Paper submission deadline: August 1, 2020
- Talk proposal submission deadline: August 15, 2020
SUBMISSION:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tto2020
*Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia* ∙ glciampaglia.com
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
<https://www.usf.edu/engineering/cse/> ∙ University
of South Florida <https://www.usf.edu/>
*Due to Florida’s broad open records law, email to or from university
employees is public record, available to the public and the media upon
request.*
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