Hi all.
On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 2:02 AM Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
I just watched the showcase of December 2018, thank you for the interesting contribution!
For those interested who haven't watched it, Ziko is referring to: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018
Thanks, Ziko! More below.
It would be great it further research could have a look at questions such as language choice.
Agreed. This has been a request by a few other community members as well. One interesting question to address here is: can we characterize language switching? More specifically: are there specific conditions under which switching happens? This will allow us to answer questions like: Are there specific topics that are covered in language x and not y that trigger switching? Is switching a function of availability of content or we can still see switching even when the content exists in the 2+ languages the user is comfortable reading content in? ...
Diego started looking into this, and you can follow his future work at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... We will do more work in this space in coming 6 months.
With regard to have more insight in what readers want, I struggled in the past with two questions:
Regionally important content: Should a Wikipedia language version concentrate on regional topics, or try to cover a large variety of topics?
This is a good question, and as you stated, it is related to understanding reader needs and some of the research in understanding language switching behavior can help us understand this better. Another aspect to keep an eye on is Denny's recent proposal for abstract Wikipedia [1]. If that direction is picked up, we may have more reason to emphasize on regionally important content creation first.
Large or small articles: Some printed encyclopedias had relatively few, but large articles. Others segmented the content into many small articles. (Think of Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropedia and Micropedia.) What do Wikipedia readers want? Do they prefer to read about a larger topic in one long, well structured article? Or several short ones, linking to each other?
This is an interesting one, too. There are at least two ways to approach this question: study how Wikipedia readers learn (what it means to learn needs to be defined) and then do a series of user studies across languages and regions to find patterns and provide recommendations for how to organize content with readers in mind. The other approach, which I would love to see in action, is to break down the article into many pieces and allow the reader to pick and choose to create a learning experience for learning topic x. Then, learn from the way readers learn. This will be building on Collection [2], Gather [3] or other similar initiatives. Search data can also be valuable here. (just to be clear: this is not something we're looking into right now, but it's a fascinating area that if someone has bandwidth and resources to look into, it can help us learn a lot.)
I could imagine that a reader who is interested in information for work or school prefers long articles that provide an in-depth approach in order to became familiar with the overall topic (that is, what one would expect traditionally).
We don't know if this assumption is correct: in fact, we have the length of article as a feature in the study and it's not picked up as a feature that defines this user group. What we know is that across the 14 languages in the study, this group of readers have longer dwell times on articles, they use the desktop platform, and they come to Wikipedia in the afternoon [4].
The above being said, we can't say for sure based on the recent study that this group of readers don't prefer longer articles because if the longer article in the topic of their interest doesn't exist on Wikipedia, they may have to work with the shorter article. It would be great to have some user studies to understand this group and their needs better.
And that "news" readers want to look up something quickly, in a short, simplyfing article.
This one we don't know. :) What we know is that across languages, this was not observed as a consistent pattern (check table 2 in the most recent paper [5]. for enwiki specific audience, check table 2a in the first paper [6]: while 38% of the users motivated by media are coming to look up a fact another 62% are there for overview or in-depth reading.).
On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 5:58 AM Bob Kosovsky bobkosovsky@nypl.org wrote:
"Large or small articles." I've noticed this point of contention at the outset of my Wikipedia editing. There are some editors (and presumably readers) who want Wikipedia to look and function like a traditional encyclopedia, with thorough articles reflecting well-written and thoughtful essays that one used to find in encyclopedias. Those who know anything about web design know that a long essay goes against the design ethos of the web where some advise against webpages that require excessive scrolling.
We need to understand this better. What we see in the recent study is that readers in countries with low Human Development Index read Wikipedia more frequently in-depth (when compared to those in high HDI countries). What we don't know is if the current forms that the articles are written in is satisfying their learning needs or they would prefer to read and learn using the same content but in different representations. I shared some ideas in my response to Ziko how we can learn more about this aspect of reader needs.
The bottom line is that I don't think one can or should make a definitive rule regarding these issues because different communities will want different attributes and styles. To be sure, editors/readers should be aware that such options exist and that Wikipedia style varies considerably from article to article (and community to community).
Agreed, but I suggest we don't stop there: * We should experiment with ways to bring editors and readers closer to each other. I mention this in the discussion part of the showcase as well: at the moment, the broadly available link from readers to editors is pageviews on an article page, and perhaps some other features. We can experiment with ways that can empower editors to understand the audience of their articles better. * We can think of ways to make the content and its representation less rigid from the reader perspective. While each language community has their own style of writing, we can experiment with allowing the reader to pick and choose content and represent it in the way that is most useful for their reading needs.
On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 6:31 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko van Dijk, 13/12/18 12:02:
Regionally important content: Should a Wikipedia language version concentrate on regional topics, or try to cover a large variety of topics?
This question is automatically solved if instead of focusing on Wikipedia you do Wikisource. Wikisource will only contain texts published in that language, such as local fiction and official acts of local entities.
Correct, but the sources in a given language may or may not be about regional topics. So even in the case of Wikisource, the question of whether to focus on regional (geographically close) topics can be valid. I /think/ in the case of Wikisource you can imagine that while it's important to capture all of the possible sources of a language, you may want to prioritize region-specific sources over others if you have specific objectives.
Best, Leila
[1] http://simia.net/download/abstractwikipedia_whitepaper.pdf [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gather [4] First bullet point on page 6. [5] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.00474.pdf [6] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05379.pdf