Greg,
Yes that's what I meant. On Wikipedia you get what you measure, so many
Wikipedians are page-creators and page-hit junkies because we can measure
that. The trick to motivating editors is giving them other measurements for
progress. Here is the link to the Women writers Wikiproject and as you
scroll down you can see what is measured.
Jane
On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 3:39 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts, Jane.
I did not know this
was happening--I'm hardly an expert, so that's not surprising, and yet it's
still very troubling to hear. I'm not sure what you mean by setting up a
Wikiproject. Do you mean of ways for how to study this gap--i.e., the ideas
that have been floated in this thread to this point? Or are you thinking of
something else?
Greg
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (WereSpielChequers)
2. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Greg)
3. Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Federico Leva (Nemo))
4. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Jane Darnell)
5. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Federico Leva (Nemo))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:28:25 +0100
From: WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
Message-ID:
<CAAanWP3qJnMpLB4tr9Eqt4EJLg2kCihkb50UY-d8=
ShNONhSAA(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Hi Greg,
One of the major step changes in the early growth of the English
Wikipedia
was when a bot called RamBot created stub
articles on US places. I think
they were cited to the census. Others have created articles on rivers in
countries and various other topics by similar programmatic means.
Nowadays
such article creation is unlikely to get
consensus on the English
Wikipedia, but there are some languages which are very open to such
creations and have them by the million.
I'm not sure if the fastest updating of existing articles is automated or
just semiautomated. But looking at the bot requests page, it certainly
looks like some people are running such maintenance bots "updating GDP by
country" is a current bot request.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests.
I'm not sure how "the ease of a source for purposes of converting into a
table and generating a separate article for each row" relates to gender.
But i suspect "number of times cited in wikipedia" deserves less kudos
than
"number of times cited in academia".
WSC
On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 05:22, Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks again, Kerry. I am hoping that someone
with access to more
resources
(knowledge, support, etc) than I have will look
into this.
A few more thoughts/questions:
1. The link to the citation dataset from the Medium article ("What are
the
> ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.") is broken.
> 2. As far as I can tell, every named author in the top ten most cited
> sources on Wikipedia is male. One piece is by a working group
> 3. This line from the Medium piece struck me: "Many of these
publications
have been
cited by Wikipedians across large series of articles using
powerful bots and automated tools."
Are citations being added by bots? I'm not sure that I understand that
line
correctly.
Greg
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:16:25 -0700
From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
Message-ID:
<CAOO9DNvGyfvJkzyRq60cSQi-T80mAkUa=
vCPkzFbEysfGQqnVg(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Thanks, WSC. All very interesting.
I've been thinking about Wiklpedia citations less in terms of kudos and
more in terms of a feedback loop. The cited sources get a significant
amount of attention (1 click per 200 pageviews is the number I saw
recently). When I imagine total Wikipedia traffic, that's huge. How many
students are finding sources this way? How many academics? And how many
of
these citations are finding their way back into
academic publications via
this mechanism?
Assuming this is happening to some degree, the gender imbalance of the
citations is also reflected. If the Wikipedia imbalance is the same as
the
one in academia, that's one thing; if it is
better on Wikipedia than it
is
in academia, that's reason to celebrate; if
the balance is worse, that's
concerning. In fact, if the gender imbalance conforms to my fears instead
of my hopes, and is magnified by the massive website traffic, I imagine
it
could even explain the growth in the citation
disparity researchers note
in
their study of political science texts. (I link
to that study in a
previous
post; it was mentioned in the Washington Post
recently)
There is a very real possibility that Wikipedia is making the citation
gender gap worse. I think we need to understand what is happening and
take
immediate action if the news is not good.
Greg
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:59:07 +0300
From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, Aaron Halfaker
<ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org>rg>, Kerry Raymond <
kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and
how to find them sooner
Message-ID: <cf2734ff-d2cf-3108-691f-8ecf46125ed7(a)gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Please everyone avoid using jargon specific to the English Wikipedia on
this cross-language and cross-wiki mailing list.
Aaron Halfaker, 23/08/19 17:36:
I think embeddings[1] would be a nice way to
create a signature.
There is some discussion of acceptable user fingerprinting (presumably
to be available to CheckUsers only), other than the usual over-reliance
on IP addresses, in particular at
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancement_and_Ab…
.
Federico
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:17:46 +0200
From: Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
Message-ID:
<CAFVcA-G87k26nBMr=-e-+C8o6eG0KQvVihH=
f4M40faVNbKkqw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Greg,
Thanks for worrying. This is a known problem and yes, Wikipedia
contributes
to the Gendergap in citations and no, it's
not an easy fix, since it is
the
fault of systemic bias in academia. So fewer
women are head author on
scientific publications, and it is generally only the head author that
gets
cited on Wikipedia. This is not just a problem
with written works in the
field of politics. I spend most of my time working on paintings and
their
documented catalogs, so generally I only notice
and fix this problem in
art
catalogs. Women rarely appear as lead author
mentioned. I will always add
them in to descriptions when I add items for their works on Wikidata,
but I
can not always find them! Sometimes I can't
even create items for them
because all I have is a name and a work and nothing else available online
anywhere. You see this most often with women who spent entire careers
working at a single institution and the institution doesn't bother to
promote their work or even list them in exhibition catalogs. With luck
there might be a local obituary, but not always. If you have suggestions
how to set up a Wikiproject to tackle this it would be a good idea. In my
onwiki experience the Women-in-Red community can be very positive in
their
response to gendergap-related issues for women
writers.
Jane
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 6:17 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, WSC. All very interesting.
>
> I've been thinking about Wiklpedia citations less in terms of kudos and
> more in terms of a feedback loop. The cited sources get a significant
> amount of attention (1 click per 200 pageviews is the number I saw
> recently). When I imagine total Wikipedia traffic, that's huge. How
many
students
are finding sources this way? How many academics? And how many
of
> these citations are finding their way back into academic publications
via
> > this mechanism?
> >
> > Assuming this is happening to some degree, the gender imbalance of the
> > citations is also reflected. If the Wikipedia imbalance is the same as
> the
>
one in academia, that's one thing; if it
is better on Wikipedia than it
> is
> > in academia, that's reason to celebrate; if the balance is worse,
that's
> concerning. In fact, if the gender imbalance
conforms to my fears
instead
of my
hopes, and is magnified by the massive website traffic, I imagine
it
> could even explain the growth in the citation disparity researchers
note
> in
>
their study of political science texts. (I
link to that study in a
> previous
> > post; it was mentioned in the Washington Post recently)
> >
> > There is a very real possibility that Wikipedia is making the citation
> > gender gap worse. I think we need to understand what is happening and
> take
> > immediate action if the news is not good.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:45:09 +0300
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, Greg
> <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID: <835202af-4653-641e-782e-c619458bdd7f(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
>
> Greg, 22/08/19 06:19:
> > I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> subset
> > of the citations.
>
> If I see correctly, you still did not receive an answer on the data
> available.
>
> It's true that the Figshare item for
> <
>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_in_Wik…
was deleted (I've asked about it on the talk page), but it's trivial to
run
https://pypi.org/project/mwcites/ and extract the data yourself, at
least for citations which use an identifier.
Some example datasets produced this way:
https://zenodo.org/record/15871
https://zenodo.org/record/55004
https://zenodo.org/record/54799
Once you extract the list of works, the fun begins. You'll need to
intersect with other data sources (Wikidata, ORCID, other?) and account
for a number of factors until you manage to find a subset of the data
which has a sufficiently high signal:noise ratio. For instance you might
need to filter or normalise by
* year of publication (some year recent enough to have good data but old
enough to allow the work to be cited elsewhere, be archived after
embargos);
* country or institution (some probably have better ORCID coverage);
* field/discipline and language;
* open access status (per Unpaywall);
* number of expected pageviews and clicks (for instance using
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews> and
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstream#Releases
;
a link from 10k articles on asteroids or proteins is not the same as
being the lone link from a popular article which is not the same as a
link buried among a thousand others on a big article);
* time or duration of the addition (with one of the various diff
extraction libraries, content persistence data or possibly historical
eventstream if such a thing is available).
To avoid having to invent everything yourself, maybe you can reuse the
method of some similar study, for instance the one on the open access
citation advantage or one of the many which studied the gender imbalance
of citations and peer review in journals.
However, it's very possible that the noise is just too much for a
general computational method. You might consider a more manual approach
on a sample of relevant events, for instance the *removal* of citations,
which is in my opinion more significant than the addition.* You might
extract all the diffs which removed a citation from an article in the
last N years (probably they'll be in the order of 10^5 rather than
10^6), remove some massive events or outliers, sample 500-1000 of them
randomly and verify the required data manually.
As usual it will be impossible to have an objective assessment of
whether that citation was really (in)appropriate in that context
according to the (English or whatever) Wikipedia guidelines. To test
that too, you should replicate one of the various studies of the gender
imbalance of peer review, perhaps one of those which tried to assess the
impact of a double blind peer review system on the gender imbalance.
However, because the sources are already published, you'd need to
provide the agendered information yourself and make sure the
participants perform their assessment in some controlled environment
where they don't have access to any gendered information (i.e. where you
cut them off the internet).
How many years do you have to work on this project? :-)
Federico
(*) I might add a citation just because it's the first result a popular
search engine gives me, after glancing at the abstract and maybe the
journal home page; but if I remove an existing citation, hopefully I've
at least assessed its content and made a judgement about it, apart from
cases of mass removals for specific problems with certain articles or
publication venues.
------------------------------
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