A note of caution...
My understanding of action research is that it is BIG -- involves organizational change on a large scale and a lot of time to go longitudinal work. If you want to do it right, it's not anyone's side project. And I always prefer to do it right. ;-)
I humbly suggest that a well-scoped, narrowly targeted correlational study (or set of studies) would be the next step for pursuing the quality-quantity connection. Even if one were to attempt action research to understand the Wikipedia community and the design of the rating system, I'm wondering if it wouldn't more like a design experiment/design study, which is an approach that draws on action research but (in my understanding) is focused more on developing theories of human behavior and cognition and principles to inform the design of artifacts like social and educational software. Coincidentally, understanding the nuanced relationship between these approaches is already on my to-do list, since I just started a three-year design study!
Both of these approaches are complex and I would hesitate to undertake anything on such a scale without the input of a researcher well-versed in these methods and a detailed proposal for moving forward. If someone has the time for this scale of project, wonderful. If everyone is trying to squeeze it in among other big projects, maybe not the best approach because my prediction is that we won't end up with anything quality enough to matter.
-andrea
On 12/17/05, Jakob Voss jakob.voss@nichtich.de wrote:
Gordon Joly wrote:
At 08:55 -0500 16/12/05, Jimmy Wales wrote:
In January, it is anticipated that the long-awaited "article validation" feature will go live. This is essentially just a system for gathering public feedback and *doing nothing with it* (at first). The idea is to simply record feedback on all the articles and then take a look at it with minimal a prior preconceptions on what it will tell us to do. [...]
So, how does that differ from a member of the "public" editing by correcting an article or musing in the talk page?
Action research anyone?
I read Action research is
- Data Collection
- Evaluation
- Action
- ...
So what data do you need?
# edits per article (for which articles) # edits on it's discussion page (dito) # distinct authors per article # distinct authors per discussion page # percentage of anonymous edits ...?
Unfourtunately the history export is disabled but I can get the data out of the XML dump und the database.
Greetings, Jakob _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l