Hoi, Just consider, when a language is taught in secondary school and a Wikipedia has < 2500 articles.. What is the purpose of all education related research particularly when in university the language is not taught? Now consider that our research is about professor types teaching on universities ... interesting sure applicable hardly. In the same vein, with < 2500 articles we DO want secondary school information included. When you consider languages like Malayalam, the importance of Wikisource compared to English is utterly different. English has Open Library and while it is wonderful, its user interface is English only..
When you consider the use of Commons and Wikidata, they are not at all usable in most other languages AND we do not have a strategy how to make them usable in other languages. Realise that the technical ability to make things multi lingual does not make them usable in multiple languages.. It is why I have my Africa project and hope to find people interesting in the approach. [1]
The problem with science is not in the science itself. The problem is that any marketing notion are absent. You study how it works and it does not translate in ways and means that make a difference. Even the notion of teaching Wikidata by teaching them to query is in and of itself problematic [2]. It is problematic because there are no labels in other languages and there are no strategies to populate the labels in other languages not even for sub sets.
Thanks, GerardM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GerardM/Africa [2] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/10/what-data-is-wrangled-is-obviou...
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 at 13:36, Jan Dittrich jan.dittrich@wikimedia.de wrote:
Hello researchers,
A lot of research on Wikipedia is published in English and also uses the English Wikipedia as source of data or researchers get their participants via English Wikipedia [0].
A frequent criticism I meet when discussing such research with non-en.wp community members is that their Wikipedia is different and the results of en.wp base research are problematic/incomparable/totally useless.
So I want to ask:
- Do you know of research comparing different Wikis, preferably across
language versions? [1]
- How would you deal with such criticism, particularly of the "if it is not
about 'my' wp it is useless"-kind [2]?
Kind Regards, Jan
[0] Plausible due to academi fields, particularly Computer Science, publishing mainly in english, size and WMF as actor being US-based. [1] I know of »revisiting "The Rise and Decline" in a Population of Peer Production Projects« (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173929), comparing different Wikia-Wikis; Research like "limits of self-organization" (https://firstmonday.org/article/view/1405/1323) that refer to general principles of peer production. Comparisons of Wikipedias across languages and the impact of their different contexts, languages and regulations would be very interesting to me. [2] I'm aware that making heterogeneous things comparable is seen as a core academic/scientific activity in STS research (Law, SL Star, Turnbull…) so I do not want to say, transfer to a different setting is not a problem – but it is certainly not "totally useless" either.
-- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ Research
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