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.