Hi everyone,
A friendly reminder that we will be starting our showcase in about 1 hour. The theme is *A Look at External Factors that Help Different Language Versions of Wikipedia Thrive*. You can watch at https://www.youtube.com/live/oH0PCNIzF0E.
Best, Kinneret
On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 11:59 AM Kinneret Gordon kgordon@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, November 20, at 9:30 AM PST / 17:30 UTC. Find your local time here https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1732123800. The theme for this showcase is *A Look at External Factors that Help Different Language Versions of Wikipedia Thrive*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/oH0PCNIzF0E. As usual, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentations: The social embeddedness of peer production: A comparative qualitative analysis of three Indian language Wikipedia editionsBy *Sejal Khatri*Why do some peer production projects do a better job at engaging potential contributors than others? We address this question by comparing three Indian language Wikipedias, namely, Malayalam, Marathi, and Kannada. We found that although the three projects share goals, technological infrastructure, and a similar set of challenges, Malayalam Wikipedia’s community engages language speakers in contributing at a much higher rate than the others. Drawing from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 18 community participants from the three projects, we found that experience with participatory governance and free/open-source software in the Malayalam community supported high engagement of contributors. Counterintuitively, we found that financial resources intended to increase participation in the Marathi and Kannada communities hindered the growth of these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of social and cultural context in the trajectories of peer production communities.Low-Resource Languages and Online Knowledge Repositories: A Need-Finding StudyBy *Hellina Hailu Nigatu, UC Berkeley*Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages—including most African communities—the quality and volume of content available are often inadequate. One reason for this lack of adequate content could be that many OKRs embody Western ways of knowledge preservation and sharing, requiring many low-resourced language communities to adapt to new interactions. In this talk, we will go through findings from two studies: (1) a thematic analysis of Wikipedia forum discussions and (2) a contextual inquiry study with 14 novice contributors who create content in low-resourced languages. We will focus on three Ethiopian languages: Afan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Our analysis revealed several recurring themes; for example, contributors struggle to find resources to corroborate their articles in low-resourced languages, and language technology support, like translation systems and spellcheck, result in several errors that waste contributors’ time. Based on our analysis, we will also outline design opportunities for building better language support tools and interfaces for low-resourced language speakers. Best,Kinneret
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Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/