Hi all,
I've started working on a paper with folks who ran a fascinating project called "Wikipedia Primary School" [1] where they investigated different mechanisms or models for eliciting and developing Wikipedia content that was relevant to the South African national primary school curriculum. We are currently writing a paper that assesses each of the different types of "interventions" that were tested/tried out in trying to fill in these gaps - including editathons, contests and collaborations with scientific journals. It seems as though there are a host of different types of models that are used to fill in Wikipedia's gaps beyond the original "volunteer edits what interests them in their spare time" model (e.g. Wikipedians in residence, editing Wikipedia as part of class assignments). If anyone has any good references to work already undertaken in this area please let me know!
Many thanks, Heather.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Primary_School
Dr Heather Ford University Academic Fellow School of Media and Communications http://media.leeds.ac.uk/, The University of Leeds w: hblog.org / EthnographyMatters.net http://ethnographymatters.net/ / t: @hfordsa http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa