Thanks a lot for bringing this up.
Sorry for not offering a solution, but I do want to mention a frequently-missed aspect of the problem: Wikis in different languages have some differences that are understandable because they reflect some objective cultural characteristics of the people who speak it. But some differences are artificial and exit because in the early days of Wikimedia (mid-2000s) there were no convenient ways for wikis to communicate and share info. There were no global accounts and no convenient translation tools.
Templates are still not global, even though there is huge demand for it,[1] and a lot of community process are implemented using templates: requests for deletion, requests for unblocking, article sorting for WikiProjects, stub sorting. Many of these things could be unified, at least partially, by making templates global, and among many benefits, it would make research easier, too.
[1] It came at #3 in the Community Wishlist vote in 2015, and at #1 in 2016. Despite this demand, it was not implemented :(
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
בתאריך יום ד׳, 2 באוק׳ 2019 ב-14:37 מאת Jan Dittrich < jan.dittrich@wikimedia.de>:
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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