Hello Andrew,
I am not quite sure if this is what you are looking for. A general framework for Wikipedia research... I wonder how general that can be. Some authors have tried to make use of systems theory, but this is not what I would recommend. It all depends what your research is about, so the framework would come from media science? computer science? social science? linguistics? etc.
A book I that I found useful for my thought process was this one:
Jerome Kagan: The Three Cultures. Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et.al. 2009.
It reminded me of the different approaches that are common in different disciplines.
In "Wikis und die Wikipedia verstehen" I have written some lines about it, here in a rough semi-automatic translation. See below.
Kind regards Ziko
Kagan speaks of "three cultures" that offer different approaches to reality. The three cultures differ in which main questions are asked in a science, which sources are collected, and what control one has over the circumstances under which evidence is collected, to what degree one generalizes, to what extent one takes into account historical phenomena, and what importance one attaches to ethical values. Kagan suspects that humanists and social scientists are more similar to each other in their ideas and methods than they are to the natural scientists (Kagan 2009: 2/3). If necessary, one can speak of a socio-cultural approach.
Natural scientists, according to Kagan, are concerned with predicting and explaining natural phenomena. One observes the material in a controlled way in experiments and works in both small and large groups. Scholars in the Humanities are interested in how people react to events and what meaning they ascribe to an experience. Historical circumstances and the influence of the ethical are of the highest importance to them. They usually work alone and delight in "semantically coherent arguments described in elegant prose." Social scientists are concerned with the predictability and explanation of human behavior (ibid.: 4/5).
In this book, therefore, we distinguish between the following three levels or dimensions in which wiki-related phenomena take place or can be described.
- The technical dimension refers to the technical and scientific subjects, including subjects from computer science and mathematics. One focus is the wiki as a technical medium including user accounts and pages. - The cultural dimension deals with typical humanities issues, especially with regard to the wiki content. - The (human) social dimension is concerned with the social relations between the actors. This communicative dimension is to be understood comprehensively, and it deals not only with questions of the actual social sciences, but also of law and politics. <<
Am Do., 3. Feb. 2022 um 17:28 Uhr schrieb Andrew Green agreen@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
I hope this is the right place to ask this question!
I was wondering if folks who are doing (or are interested in) research about Wikipedia might like to share texts that they feel best describe the general research frameworks they use (or might like to use).
I'd love to hear about any texts you like, regardless of format (textbook, paper, general reference, blog post, etc.).
It seems a lot of work about Wikipedia uses approaches from Computational Social Science. The main references I have for that are [1] and [2].
I'm especially interested in links between Computational Social Science and frameworks from more traditional social sciences and cognitive science.
Many thanks in advance!!!!! :) Cheers, Andrew
[1] Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2017) /Introduction to Computational Social Science. Principles and Applications. Second Edition./ Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
[2] Melnik, R. (ed.) (2015)/Mathematical and Computational Modeling. With Applications in Natural and Social Sciences, Engineering, and the Arts/. Hoboken, U.S.A.: Wiley.
-- Andrew Green (he/him) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org