dear Ofer, Einat and Alex to review articles and to write articles on Wikipedia i would strongly suggest to focus on experts of that topic who are teachers (not necessarily people who have written a scientific article on that topic).
you are not looking for an advocate of a theory or for the last innovation, but rather you are looking for a person capable of providing an overview of a topic in a balanced way. a person who has written a scientific article about a specific topic will be very good at telling you what he/she thinks about that topic, but he/she will have troubles at providing the overview encyclopedic articles need. the teaching experience I think it is the best one to allow people to gain a real overview of a topic.
we noticed this issue within the project Wikipedia Primary School in which we involved around 30 experts in reviewing articles of Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Primary_School_SSAJRP_pro... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Primary_School_SSAJRP_programme but furthermore i discussed it with the director of Treccani (the Italian encyclopedia) and he explained me that the select for their articles not the best person who can present the topic (not the best - cutting edge/innovative - expert on the topic); furthermore they involve 7 other experts in the review process to make sure the article is balanced.
we also found very successful to have experts working outside wikipedia. we had them reviewing articles on a pdf to maintain their “status” (their status of experts works outside wikipedia, not inside since wikipedia has its own way of defining status) and to have them producing a review like they are used to without having them to learn how to use a wiki or how to interact with wikipedia (we provide them a pdf of the article, a template for the review, and a form to make their work under cc by-sa; we uploaded the review on Wikimedia commons and provide it on the discussion page of the article)
(here the review made during the project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Primary_School_SSAJRP_pro... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Primary_School_SSAJRP_programme/Review and we are preparing now an article with Heather Ford about this research result)
all the best iolanda/iopensa
Il giorno 10 lug 2017, alle ore 22:02, Alex Yarovoy yarovoy.alex@gmail.com ha scritto:
Thank you Leila, Stuart, Pine We will follow up on these comments and pointers
A few additional words about this research - Our narrow definition of formal expertise focuses on those with academic qualifications who have published a scholarly work (i.e. appears in Google Scholar) in the topic of the specific Wikipedia articles where one was active. We acknowledge that many experts do not have academic qualifications. The choice of "formal" (i.e. academic in this context) expertise enabled a concrete operationalization and measurement. We welcome any ideas for pinpointing informal experts.
We are currently in the first phase of research where we try to identify these formal experts. We've spent considerable amount of time in identifying 500 such experts, and now we use machine learning techniques to automatically spot them (preliminary results are quite good). Once this is done, we can start asking interesting questions, such as:
- What is the relative role of these formal experts to overall content
contributed to Wikipedia?
- Are formal experts' contributions "better"? (e.g. survive longer or
result in increased quality score (per ORES)
- Who are those formal experts? anonymous contributors? registered users?
do they take additional roles within the community?
- Formal experts' motivation
Any other ideas for taking this research forward are more than welcome.
Thank you, Ofer, Einat and Alex _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l