In the human-computer interaction field, I'd highlight three seminal papers:
Viégas and Wattenberg's 2004 paper established Wikipedia as an area of
study, and used novel visualization techniques to demonstrate how quickly
vandalism is removed from the encyclopedia. Back in 2004, the main research
question was probably "how does this thing even work?", particularly with
regards to combating vandalism, and this paper starts the path of answering
that question.
Priedhorsky et al's 2007 paper dug into authorship of content that is
viewed, giving us good insights into the "who writes Wikipedia?" question.
It asks some important questions around what "value" is in a
peer-production community like Wikipedia (is content that is viewed more
often more valuable?) There's also some cool methodological aspects of this
paper (it uses MD5 checksums for revert detection, and there's now SHA1
checksums for all revision in Wikipedia's API).
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia
community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance
processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding
good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are
struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see
also the Teahouse paper).
Another question that I find really interesting and that is perhaps often
overlooked is "why did Wikipedia succeed?" It's easy to think that there
were few or no other competitors in the online encyclopedia space at the
time it got started, but there were a bunch of them. Mako Hill's PhD thesis
has a chapter that looks at that
<https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf>, and he also gave
a talk at the Berkman Klein Center
<https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill> about this.
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on the
English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions, or
across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point
to. Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's important
to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Cited papers:
- Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying
cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations.
In *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems* (pp. 575-582).
- Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S. T. K., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., &
Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in
Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on
Supporting group work* (pp. 259-268).
- Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The
rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction
to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*,
*57*(5), 664-688.
- Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013,
February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on
wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported
cooperative work* (pp. 839-848).
Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer
Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2013.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 05:44, Eric Luth <eric.luth(a)wikimedia.se> wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest
daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for
"interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily within
any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and that
you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best
*Eric Luth*
Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and
Advocacy
Wikimedia Sverige
eric.luth(a)wikimedia.se
+46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige.
Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se
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