Hi Kerry,
I suspect it is likely to be different if you differentiate between
articles tagged by people involved in a particular WikiProject, articles
tagged into a WikiProject by newpage patrollers and other taggers, and
articles tagged into all their relevant wikiprojects.
The backlog of articles not allocated to any Wikiproject at all is usually
pretty small. But that doesn't mean that all articles are fully tagged for
Wikiprojects.
A few years ago I was involved in a major cleanup operation for our then
backlog of unsourced biographies of Living People. One of our tactics was
to create reports for each relevant wikiproject showing the unsourced
biographies that were relevant to them and encouraging them to help delete
or improve the articles in that report. At one point in the cleanup we
realised that only about half of the articles we were looking at were
tagged to any Wikiproject other than Biography. So a group of volunteers
went through I think it was twenty thousand unsourced biographies that were
only tagged to WikiProject Biography and tagged them to the relevant
wikiprojects, that usually meant at least one geographic project and one
occupational one. Some of the Wikiprojects were assiduous in improving all
the articles we found for them, Heavy Metal I remember being very
efficient. Others just trawled through and nominated the unnotables and
hoaxes for deletion, WikiProject Croatia was one of those.
With a large proportion of WikiProjects dormant at any one time, I rather
suspect that most of the tagging for WikiProjects is in effect a subset of
the categorisation process rather than a sign that someone interested in
the topic has tagged the article for their WikiProject.
Regards
Jonathan
On Wed, 15 Jan 2020 at 21:13, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Out of idle curiosity ...
Are there significant numbers of articles NOT tagged by any WikiProject?
In my experience on-wiki, any article (apart from ones recently created)
are tagged by one or more WikiProjects.
I guess the converse question is what articles are the most tagged by
WikiProjects? I am often surprised at how many WikiProjects jump in to tag
some article I have created (I am more likely to notice the tagging of
articles I create because they automatically go on my watchlist).
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Isaac Johnson
Sent: Thursday, 16 January 2020 6:54 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] New dataset of articles tagged by WikiProjects
Hey Research Community,
TL;DR New dataset:
https://figshare.com/articles/Wikipedia_Articles_and_Associated_WikiProject…
More details:
I wanted to notify everyone that we have published a dataset of the
articles on English Wikipedia that have been tagged by WikiProjects [1]
through templates on their associated talk pages. We are not planning to
make this an ongoing release, but I have provided the script that I used to
generate it in the Figshare item so that others might update / adjust to
meet their needs.
As anyone who has done research on WikiProjects knows, it can be
complicated to determine what articles fit under a particular WikiProject's
purview. The motivation for generating this dataset was to support our work
in developing topic models for Wikipedia (see [2] for an overview), but we
imagine that there are many other ways in which this dataset might be
useful:
* Previous work has examined how active WikiProjects are based on edits to
their pages in the Wikipedia namespace. This dataset makes it much easier
to identify which Wikiprojects are managing the most valuable articles on
Wikipedia (in terms of quality or pageviews).
* Many topic-level analyses of Wikipedia rely on the category network.
Categories can be very messy and difficult to work with, but WikiProjects
represent an alternative that often is simpler and still quite rich. For
instance, this could be used for temporal analyses of article quality,
demand, or distribution by topic.
* While WikiProjects are English-only and therefore limited in their
utility to other languages, we also provide the Wikidata ID and sitelinks
-- i.e. titles for corresponding articles in other languages -- to allow
for multilingual analyses. This could be used to compare gaps in coverage
-- e.g., akin to past work that has used categories [3].
The main challenge, besides processing time, is how to 1) effectively
extract the WikiProject templates from talk pages, and, 2) consistently
link them to a canonical WikiProject name and topic. For example, the
canonical template for WikiProject Medicine is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:WikiProject_Medicine but another
one used is
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WPMED&redirect=no
(and there are 13 more). To capture articles tagged with these many
templates and all link them to the same canonical WikiProject and
eventually higher-level topic, we built a near-complete list of
WikiProjects based on the WikiProject Directory [4] and gathered all of
their associated templates. We purposefully excluded WikiProjects under the
assistance / maintenance category [5]. When parsing talk pages from the
dump files then, we check for any of these templates and list them under
their canonical name. As a backup, we also employ case-insensitive string
matching with "WP" and "WikiProject", which helps to guarantee that
we did
not miss any WikiProjects but introduces a number of false positives as
well. If you wish to map the WikiProjects listed in the dataset to their
higher-level topics, the mapping is in the figshare item and code that
allows you to do that can be found here:
https://github.com/wikimedia/drafttopic/blob/master/drafttopic/utilities/ta…
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council
[2]
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274290
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2019/September#Wikipedi…
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory/Wikip…
Best,
Isaac
--
Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
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