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_pr…
<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_pr…
<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(a)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
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