Hello all,
This is sort of related to the previous thread on consent, and is
something that's been on my mind for a while.
As someone who is reasonably visible in the wiki research community
and Wikipedia, I get asked fairly often to either a) help recruit
participants for studies of Wikipedia, or b) participate myself in
such studies.
The common theme of such requests is often:
* The researcher wants to find people who are invested in Wikipedia,
for qualitative studies of contributors
* The researcher does not know how to go about doing this
* What "invested" means is often poorly defined, since the researcher
is often trying to figure out what participation looks like more
generally
* The researcher has done the standard things (posted on the mailing
list, on the village pump) and hasn't gotten any results; or has
semi-randomly posted on people's talk pages, potentially getting a
warning about spamming in the process
As a result:
* many of the same people (i.e. very visible contributors) keep
getting asked to participate in different studies; or
* the researcher is left with a self-selected group of people from the
mailing lists or other places, which may in no way represent 'the
community' (my hypothesis is that we have many small communities,
working under the greater umbrella of Wikipedia); and who may be
people who are particularly outspoken or disgruntled; or
* the researcher does not get enough participants to do a good study
So:
* Is there a good solution for these problems?
* Can we come up with "best practices" or advice for people who are
trying to recruit Wikipedians for studies?
* What about some sort of infrastructure or wikiproject to support
these requests? Every time I get one of these emails I would really
like to pass it on to a group of people to deal with, but I am not
sure who, and this mailing list seems too small and focused to support
such requests.
best,
Phoebe
p.s. I think "any wiki with a large base of contributors" could be
substituted for "Wikipedia" here -- this is probably a problem with
studying any large community-run site. But most of my requests have
come from people specifically interested in Wikipedia.
- phoebe s. ayers | phoebe.ayers(a)gmail.com
Dear All,
My name is Avanidhar Chandrasekaran
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Avanidhar).
I work with GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
As part of my research, I am involved in analyzing the usefulness and
Necessity of author reputation in Wikipedia.
In lieu of this, I have simulated an Interface to color words in an article
based on their Age.
Being experienced contributors to Wikipedia, I invite you to participate in
this study, which involves the following.
1. Please visit the following Instances of wikipedia and evaluate the
interface components which have been incorporated into each of them. Each
of these use their own algorithm to color text.
a) The Wikitrust project
http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page
b) The Wiki-reputation project at Grouplens research
http://wiki-reputation.cs.umn.edu/index.php/Main_Page
2) Once you have evaluated the two interfaces, kindly complete this survey
on Wikipedia quality
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hagN5S1JZHxH6pF9SmXkkA_3d_3d
We hope to get your valuable feedback on these interfaces and how Wikipedia
article quality can be improved.
Thanks for your time
Avanidhar Chandrasekaran,
GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota
Hello,
>From time to time I ask myself (and others) what is a "regular
contributor" to a Wikipedia language edition. According to "Tell us
about your Wikipedia" the definitions are quite different.
At eo.WP I once checked a week long (in this August) who was making
edits, and I calculated a "regular contributor" if someone
* made at least one edit in that week
* obviously speaks Esperanto (is no "foreign helper" like someone who
does Interwiki linking)
* made his first edit at least six months ago
* made at least ten edits at all
My result was: 71, compared to 141 "active users" and 50 "very active
users" (Wikimedia Statistics, May 2008).
What do you think about this definition?
Kind regards
Ziko van Dijk
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
> Statistics, with "Wikipedians", "active" and "very active users";
> like often, Zachte's Statistics are great, but easily misleading.
Also keep in mind that most figures in wikistats still include bot edits.
IMO it becomes more and more urgent to present separate counts for humans
and bots.
For instance in eo: 54% of total edits for all time were bot edits, but most
of these will be from recent years, so the percentage will be even higher
for recent years.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/BotActivityMatrix.htm
Erik Zachte
Greetings fellow wiki-researchers,
I'm currently a Wikipedian and a graduate student at Georgetown
University's Communication, Culture, and Technology program in
Washington, D.C. Some of you might remember me from this summer's
Wikimania, where I presented "Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics
Hold About Wikipedia: An Ethnography of Academics for the Wikipedian
Community." Now, as I head into the final stage of my degree, I plan
to perform the reverse study: an ethnography of Wikipedia, although
hopefully for both academics and Wikipedians.
The main reason I am writing this rather lengthy message (which is
also going to other places after some feedback here) is to inform the
community about my research and hopefully gain some feedback about my
specific protocols and techniques. Most importantly, I have to get the
permission of my university's Institutional Review Board before I
begin this research, and they require that I perform a good amount of
ethical "due diligence" with the community beforehand. First, however,
let me explain what I plan to do, which will lead into issues of
informed consent, privacy, vulnerable subjects (children), and other
thorny topics that require a response from members of the community.
Participant-observation guides my methodology. This involves entering
the community as an editor and working with all of you in the course
of doing what it is that Wikipedians do, as well as asking many
questions along the way. In one sense, I will do what I have been
doing over the past four years as an editor here: editing articles,
participating in discussions and debates, and other
encyclopedia-building tasks. However, an essential component that
distinguishes this research is the interactive and
intentionally-ignorant questioning of current community practices and
beliefs as they happen. Particularly in disputes in which I will and
will not be involved, I plan on asking Wikipedians to explain events,
outcomes, and justifications that may seem trivial or commonsensical.
The objective is to arrive at a better understanding of the way in
which the community and the project operates on multiple levels –
which my previous research indicates is grossly misrepresented in
contemporary academic and popular culture.
The main issue with such a study is informed consent, which means
making sure that any "interventions" I make while researching do no
harm to human subjects. If a researcher is using surveys, interviews,
or clinical trials, informed consent is usually secured with a signed
form or click-through page that generally states the participant knows
he/she is the subject of research and agrees to have their actions
made public in certain ways. If I were only doing surveys or
interviews, then this wouldn't be an issue; nor would it matter if I
were simply observing Wikipedia but not contributing. The issue
arises when I become an active participant in Wikipedia as a
researcher representing my university for the purpose of collecting
and publishing data.
For obvious reasons, it is incredibly difficult if each time I
entered, for example, a deletion debate, I had to get the formal
consent of everyone involved before participating. I am told that
because of the public nature of Wikipedia's on-wiki communication, I
can get the informed consent requirement waived – if and only if I can
show an alternative way of establishing informed consent that reflects
current community practices and norms, as agreed-upon by community
leaders or representatives. Now, the traditional anthropological
strategy would require me to go to Jimmy Wales or the Board and
negotiate with him/them about the various protocols. However, I think
there is a better way specific to Wikipedia, and that is creating a
page in the Wikipedia namespace where we work out what protocols any
generic ethnographic researcher ought to follow. This way, any other
ethnographers don't have to re-invent the wheel.
So this is where all of you come in, I trust. I've created a page at
Wikipedia:Ethically researching Wikipedia. It the following tentative
guidelines/protocols that I – or any ethnographer – would follow in
order to make sure that on-wiki interventions inform participants of
my research and protect everyone involved:
1.I will recognize that as an ethnographer, I am a guest of the
Wikipedian community and the Wikimedia Foundation. As such, I will
respect any decisions made by the community, the Arbitration
Committee, or the Wikimedia Foundation regarding the way in which I
participate in the project and collect data about my experiences.
2.I will fully disclose myself as a researcher of Wikipedia on my
account's userpage and user talk page. Here, I will explain who I am,
what I am doing and why, my research protocols, ways to opt-out of
research, and University administrators or faculty members who can be
contacted if concerns arise with my research.
3.I will have a signature that shows my status as a researcher of
Wikipedia to let editors know that I am interacting with them in such
a role. This will include a link to the above research description and
my talk page. Feor example:[[User:Staeiou|Staeiou]]
<sup>[[User:Staeiou#My Research|I'm researching
Wikipedia]]</sup><sub>[[User_talk:Staeiou|Questions, concerns,
comments?]]</sub>. I will sign every contribution I make to talk or
process pages.
4.When collecting data and publishing results, I can refer to th
specific actions of editors or quote them using their username. I can
also publish information they have made public on userpage, their
edit/log history, and the results of various programs that analyse
publicly available data like Interiot's edit counter.
5.I will let editors opt-out of my research. Any editor will be free
to tell me that he or she does not wish to be a subject in my
research. If this happens, I will not communicate with him or her
further, and I will exclude from my research any existing data
specifically based on my interactions with him or her.
6.If my research leads me to communicate with Wikipedians off-wiki –
whether via e-mail, chat, in person, or other medium outside of the
public wikispace – I will use established interview-based research
protocols to establish informed consent. This means that those who
communicate with me off-wiki will be initially informed of my research
project and asked to digitally consent to such communication being
used for research purposes. I will work to mutually establish the
privacy of data collected in each situation: if the conversation can
be quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to; if the author can be attributed
by name or username; or if the entire conversation is off-the-record.
7.I will work to minimize risks to subjects by focusing on topics
directly or indirectly related to Wikipedia, encyclopedia-building,
and the community. To protect subjects, I will not discuss personally
sensitive topics, such as editors' past or current illegal behavior,
sexual behavior, medical or psychological care, and drug or alcohol
use. If editors express these or other personally sensitive topics, I
will not include them in my research.
If anyone has any modifications or additions, please let me know, or
better yet, change it yourself! I've marked it with {{proposed}}, and
I'd like for it to get some sort of review or consensus.
Thanks for reading this long message. I am very excited to finally be
working on this research project, and hope to hear from some of you
soon.
R. Stuart Geiger (Staeiou)
After years of campaigning for a General User Survey, finally we get
something similar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SURVEY
I am glad somebody didn't forget about copyright: "UNU-Merit will make
anonymized research data available under the CC-BY license, and its own
analysis under the CC-BY-SA license. Results will be publicized both on
the Wikimedia blog and on the foundation-l mailing list."
I am looking forward to the results, and I expect all of the readers of
this listserv will fill in the survey :)
Disclaimer: I am not associated with UNU-Merit and had and have nothing
to do with this survey (but I tried to keep Meta:GUS alive and
sympathize with the new survey).
--
Piotr Konieczny
"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in
theory."
Diomidis Spinellis (author of the well-known book Code Reading) and
Panagiotis Louridas, both of AUEB, published "the collaborative
organization of knowledge: why Wikipedia's growth is sustainable" with
DOI:10.1145/1378704.1378720 in CACM:51-8 (Aug 2008),
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1378704.1378720
The two researchers, whose project was partially funded by the European
Commission, found that before an article is created it usually already
has incoming links, in the form of [[red links]]. Most articles get
written within a month after the first red link. Furthermore, incoming
links increase exponentially until the article is written, thus making
the links blue, at which time the increase becomes linear. Articles are
usually created by a different Wikipedian than the contributor who
inserted the first red link to it.
I infer that Wikipedians use red links as a way to communicate with one
another about which articles should be written first. The MediaWiki
software also includes the MostWanted special page in which it counts
how many incoming red links each article has. Wikipedia also has the
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] page.
I regard the use of the red links for identifying articles most needed
to be written as an example of communication through stigmergy in
Wikipedia. I am, however, somewhat concerned about whether most
Wikipedians prefer to get this information from the articles themselves
or from the MostWanted MediaWiki/Wikipedia features, and whether this
could affect the stigmergic nature of the communication. I feel that
they probably get this information from the articles themselves
spontaneously, and in that case it very much looks like stigmergy; but
if they get the information from the centralised MostWanted page, is it
still stigmergy? I would think yes, albeit the stigmergic nature of the
communication may appear to be somewhat more weak than in the other
case. What do other subscribers in the wiki-research-l mailing list
think?
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
Dear Wiki Researchers,
a lot of not, new, emerging topics are being discussed in the Semantic Wiki
community. Therefore, we are preparing an inofficial
Birds-of-a-Feather Meeting of the Community
on Sunday October 26th, after the conference workshops/tutorials
during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Karlsruhe, Germany
(the home of Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Wikipedia!)
... with ...
* Lightning Talks (sign up to give one!)
* Open Discussion Forum
* Get-Together
* and more; we appreciate your suggestions!
Please visit http://semanticweb.org/wiki/SemWiki_Meeting_ISWC_2008 and
1. let us know if you want to attend, and what your schedule for Sunday is
2. enter a lightning talk that you want to contribute
3. contribute anything else to this page, it's a wiki after all ;-)
Looking forward to the meeting -- Cheers,
Christoph
PS: To learn more about hot semantic wiki topics, and particularly if you
won't be able to join this physical meeting, please consider participating in
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_10_23
--
Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701