A few more for consideration:
Keegan et al.'s work on how editors collaborate around breaking news events https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764212469367 (I expect this to get cited a lot in the next year or so, with increased interest in the role of Wikipedia in combating COVID disinformation)
Forte et al's work on the way emergent, nested institutions within Wikipedia function https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260103 and their key role in supporting content quality and distributed decision-making. Lots of great theory-building, and an excellent example of the depth of insight that qualitative research can produce.
In terms of newer stuff, I really admire Marc Miquel-Ribe and David Laniado's methodology for mapping gaps in Wikipedia content across languages https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2018.00054/full. And I think their starting point (what is the Wikipedia content that naturally belongs within the "cultural context" of a group of language speakers?) is maybe the best approach I've found for tackling the thorny questions around defining and addressing knowledge gaps.
Also in terms of newer stuff... the Wikimedia Research showcase page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase is a great place to start one's explorations :)
- Jonathan
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 7:23 AM Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com wrote:
In the human-computer interaction field, I'd highlight three seminal papers:
Viégas and Wattenberg's 2004 paper established Wikipedia as an area of study, and used novel visualization techniques to demonstrate how quickly vandalism is removed from the encyclopedia. Back in 2004, the main research question was probably "how does this thing even work?", particularly with regards to combating vandalism, and this paper starts the path of answering that question.
Priedhorsky et al's 2007 paper dug into authorship of content that is viewed, giving us good insights into the "who writes Wikipedia?" question. It asks some important questions around what "value" is in a peer-production community like Wikipedia (is content that is viewed more often more valuable?) There's also some cool methodological aspects of this paper (it uses MD5 checksums for revert detection, and there's now SHA1 checksums for all revision in Wikipedia's API).
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming in with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do quality assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
Another question that I find really interesting and that is perhaps often overlooked is "why did Wikipedia succeed?" It's easy to think that there were few or no other competitors in the online encyclopedia space at the time it got started, but there were a bunch of them. Mako Hill's PhD thesis has a chapter that looks at that https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf, and he also gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill about this.
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on the English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions, or across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point to. Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's important to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Cited papers:
- Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying
cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp. 575-582).
- Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S. T. K., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., &
Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work* (pp. 259-268).
- Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The
rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*, *57*(5), 664-688.
- Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013,
February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work* (pp. 839-848). Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 05:44, Eric Luth eric.luth@wikimedia.se wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for "interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily
within
any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and
that
you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
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