Thanks, Heather! This looks super interesting and relevant. I look forward to reading it :)
Jonathan
On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 3:28 PM, Heather Ford hfordsa@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Amir,
I did send this via Twitter, but wanted to send here too in case anyone else is interested. Our paper summarises some of the research on notifications. A pre-print is available here:
https://makebuildplay.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/wp_primary_school_paper_ acceptedv.pdf
Happy to chat more and would very much like to chat to others doing research on knowledge gaps on Wikipedia.
Best, Heather.
Dr Heather Ford Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Media https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/, University of New South Wales w: hblog.org / EthnographyMatters.net http://ethnographymatters.net/ / t: @hfordsa http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa
On 9 February 2018 at 20:53, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
wrote:
Heather,
Thanks for starting this thread.
Where can I read your research that comes to the conclusion that
automated
mechanisms are insufficient for solving the gaps problem?
Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere already; I sometimes get lost on
long
emails, and it's possible that I missed it :)
בתאריך 9 בפבר׳ 2018 05:04, "Heather Ford" hfordsa@gmail.com כתב:
Having a look at the new WMF research site, I noticed that it seems that notification and recommendations mechanisms are the key strategy being focused on re. the filling of Wikipedia's content gaps. Having just finished a research project on just this problem and coming to the
opposite
conclusion i.e. that automated mechanisms were insufficient for solving
the
gaps problem, I was curious to find out more.
This latest research that I was involved in with colleagues was based on
an
action research project aiming to fill gaps in topics relating to South Africa. The team tried a range of different strategies discussed in the literature for filling Wikipedia's gaps without any wild success.
Automated
mechanisms that featured missing and incomplete articles catalysed very
few
edits.
When looking for related research, it seemed that others had come to a similar conclusion i.e. that automated notification/recommendations alone didn't lead to improvements in particular target areas. That makes me
think
that a) I just haven't come across the right research or b) that there
are
different types of gaps and that those different types require different solutions i.e. the difference between filling gaps across language versions, gaps created by incomplete articles about topics for which
there
are few online/reliable sources is different from the lack of articles about topics for which there are many online/reliable sources, gaps in articles about particular topics, relating to particular geographic areas etc.
Does anyone have any insight here? - either on research that would help practitioners decide how to go about a project of filling gaps in a particular subject area or about whether the key focus of research at the WMF is on filling gaps via automated means such as recommendation and notification mechanisms?
Many thanks!
Best, Heather. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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