In a parallel thread to this, things to avoid when doing wikipedia research
are being discussed. That's turning quite negative, so I thought I'd start
a contra-thead. This is all my personal experience and advice based on a
decade in en.wiki and twice that in academia.
Which account to use?
=================
There are rules about use of multiple accounts, these are detailed at
[[Wikipedia:Sock puppetry]]. Sockpuppetry is probably the harshestly
punished of errors on en.wiki. The main points to note are:
(a) using multiple accounts to hide edits, the extent of editing or to
create a false impression is strictly forbidden. [If your experimental
design depends on true anonymity, take it to
[[WP:Administrators%27_noticeboard]] for advice on how to proceed, but be
prepared to justify yourself.]
(b) you can separate your general account from accounts used for testing,
experiments, etc. In the case of automated editing, all automated editing
must be done in a separate account with a name ending in the letters 'bot'
If you use separate accounts, on-wiki stats can be used.
(c) if you use separate accounts, link them using the templates
at [[Wikipedia:Userboxes/Wikipedia/Related accounts]] or clear statements
on the user pages. See for example by user pages at [[User:Stuartyeates]]
and [[User:Stuartyeates (code test)]]
(d) different accounts can have different privileges and flags,
particularly the bot flag which permits fully automated editing and
autopatrolled which controls the level of scrutiny of new pages. You can
request for funky permissions at [[Wikipedia:Requests for permissions]],
any admin can remove permissions on request.
What kinds of topics to use
====================
As a tertiary source, Wikipedia has universal scope, biased by the coverage
of subjects in secondary sources. Some parts of that scope is more
contested than other parts and unless you wish to explicit deal with that
contestation, you probably want to avoid some things.
Hotly contested topics: current and ongoing political and military clashes
(Crimea, the South China Sea, etc.); current political/social hot-potatoes
in countries with significant English speaking populations (abortion
rights, gamergate, climate change, etc); peak ideological figures (Jesus,
Hitler, etc); current political candidates (Trump, Clinton, etc),
Average contested topics: Biographies of living people, etc
Safer topics: Biographies of the dead (give them 12 months for obits,
probate etc), migrating data from authoritative third-party sources
(official gazetteers, national biographies, etc), recent (1-5 years ago)
academic advances, etc.
Problems we don't have
===================
1) We have enough short stub articles which need expanding. We don't need
more unless they clearly serve a secondary purpose, such as combatting our
acknowledge systematic biases.
2) We are already aware of hundreds of ways to disrupt wikipedia, we don't
need demonstrations.
3) We know the internet and internet search engines are full of unreliable
websites, content farms paid shrills and armchair politicians, we don't
need any more of them added to en.wiki as sources.
4) We know that certain kinds of hoaxes are pretty trivial pull off, we
don't need any more, thanks.
Systematic problems we have
=======================
(1) Attracting, retaining and motivating a large, diverse pool of editors
(2) Preventing self-interested and promotional editing
(3) Countering our well-known systematic biases (gender, culture,
geography, time, etc)
(4) How should we resolve conflict among well-meaning editors when it arises
(5) How do we improve our processes so that as much as possible we're
dealing with the deep issues rather than the shallow issues.
(6) Approximately 1/2000 of our articles meet our highest quality
requirements. How do we improve that?
(7) Disambiguation of names (aka authority control). There are lots of
institutions, people, places and events with similar names. Sorting them
out is hard, very hard.
Incidental problems we have and might make good research topics
===================================================
For a list of incidental issues that arise see [[Wikipedia:Bot requests]].
Other points
==========
Create new pages in the Draft namespace rather than the Article namespace
Putting changes or additional sources on the talk page of an article rather
than in the body is inherently safer.
Wait for the natural conclusion of events before writing about them. For a
crime, this is sentencing or end of appeals period; for an academic
discovery this is independent verification; for a medical breakthrough this
is gaining FDA approval (or giving up); etc.
Newly created articles have high mortality and high visibility. Techniques
that improve their handling are likely to be welcomed. Possibilities
include: adding a 'links' section with automatically discovered
likely-to-be-reliable sources; comparing the new article to existing
article and adding a hatnote where a strong match is found; automatic
language detection for new articles in non-English languages;
Articles at [[WP:Articles for deletion]] are being actively contested.
Automated input into this contestation might be useful: finding relevant
non-googlable (or non-Egnlish) reliable sources on the web; spotting
conflicts of interest; etc.
I hope these notes help.
cheers
stuart
--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky