Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_and_Pinchuk)/Englis...
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
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