Jonathan,
So is that it then. Is foundation feeling too burned to ever give out the
data again? Has there been other precedent since then of releasing data to
academics?
Kerry,
Thanks for the link to the paper. I just saw this in the latest
newsletter.
Brian,
The idea of sending a script to follow other editors and then survey them
would be a good way to train a learning algorithm. I hadn't thought of
that, mostly I expected to just pour over some old edits. Thanks for the
idea.
Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023
------------------------------
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org <
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of
WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
*Sent:* Tuesday, December 31, 2013 4:31 AM
*To:* Research into Wikimedia content and communities
*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] Polling the watcher's of a page.
Possible?
How many watchlisters a page has is a sensitive issue, we've already had
one incident where a "researcher" acquired a list of unwatched pages for a
vandalism experiment.
However anyone who watches a page will also have that pages talkpage on
their watchlist, so while you can't directly contact everyone who has that
page on their watchlist you could conceivably attract the attention of some
of them by a message on its talkpage. But if you were doing more than one
or two of them you would need your note to be very relevant to the
watchlisters of that page.
Regards
Jonathan
On 31 December 2013 10:36, Brian Keegan <b.keegan(a)neu.edu> wrote:
Check out Michael Kummer's paper that looks
at a similar topic
("contagion" in pageviews among linked articles) from an econometrics
perspective: "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content – Evidence
from 23 Natural Experiments on Wikipedia"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2356199
On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
No, you can’t for reasons on privacy. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages#Privacy
But, I concur with your theory that edits are contagious. I often find
that when I get the notification that a watched page has changed, I go and
look at the page. While I am there, I often spot a “little thing that needs
doing”, which sometimes is just a simple single edit and other times
initiates a marathon of editing activity for the next couple of days J
If you want to test this theory, I think using at the set of editors of
the page might be a pretty good approximation of the watchlist. A lot of
people have the “add the pages and files I edit to my watchlist” set in
their preferences (I know I do).
For the purpose of declaring one edit as being contagious (that is,
causes another edit), what criteria would you use? I would assume you need
some time bounds here. I think there needs to be “kick-off” edits
identified. These would be edits that occurred sufficiently long after the
previous edit that contagion could not be factor. Then after the kick-off
edit, you would be looking for one or more “reaction” edits that occurred
fairly quickly after one another, suggesting a contagion based on
watchlists. So it seems there are two time parameters: the kick-off
threshold and the reaction threshold. I don’t think these are necessarily
the same value (i.e. is there is some grey zone in-between where the edits
can be categorised as neither kick-off nor reaction?).
In terms of setting these threshold(s), you might need some real-life
data to train on. So maybe you could start by asking if some editors would
send you a copy of their watchlist and you could write a script that
compared it with their edit history over the same time frame (plus a bit to
cater for bursty-ness). From that you could come up with a set of edits
that look like contagious ones and you could ask the editors to say “yes /
no / don’t remember” to try to see if 1) contagion appears to be happening
2) what the time thresholds need to be. Then test it on a bigger set of
data using edit history as a proxy for watchlists.
Kerry
------------------------------
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Klein,Max
*Sent:* Tuesday, 31 December 2013 2:26 PM
*To:* wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
*Subject:* [Wiki-research-l] Polling the watcher's of a page. Possible?
Hello Research,
It it possible to query for the watchers of a page? It does not seem to
be in the API, nor is the "watchers" or "wl_user" table in the Data
Base
replicas (where I thought MediaWiki stores it. I imagine this is for
privacy reasons, correct? If so, how would one gain access?
I have been talking with an "econophysicist" who thinks that we could
apply a "contagion" algorithm, to see which edits are "contagious".
(I met
this econopyhicist at the Berkeley Data Science Faire at which Wikimedia
Analytics presented, so it was worth it in the end).
Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023
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--
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Lazer Lab
College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University
Fellow, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
Affiliate, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
b.keegan(a)neu.edu
www.brianckeegan.com
M: 617.803.6971
O: 617.373.7200
Skype: bckeegan
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