Hi Everyone,

The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, August 23, 2017 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 UTC.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa0Ztv2iF4w

As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And, you can watch our past research showcases here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#August_2017.

This month's presentation:

Sneha Narayan (Northwestern University)

*The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users*

Integrating new users into a community with complex norms presents a challenge for peer production projects like Wikipedia. We present The Wikipedia Adventure (TWA): an interactive tutorial that offers a structured and gamified introduction to Wikipedia. In addition to describing the design of the system, we present two empirical evaluations. First, we report on a survey of users, who responded very positively to the tutorial. Second, we report results from a large-scale invitation-based field experiment that tests whether using TWA increased newcomers' subsequent contributions to Wikipedia. We find no effect of either using the tutorial or of being invited to do so over a period of 180 days. We conclude that TWA produces a positive socialization experience for those who choose to use it, but that it does not alter patterns of newcomer activity. We reflect on the implications of these mixed results for the evaluation of similar social computing systems.

Andrew Su (Scripps Research Institute)

*The Gene Wiki: Using Wikipedia and Wikidata to organize biomedical knowledge*

The Gene Wiki project began in 2007 with the goal of creating a collaboratively-written, community-reviewed, and continuously-updated review article for every human gene within Wikipedia. In 2013, shortly after the creation of the Wikidata project, the project expanded to include the organization and integration of structured biomedical data. This talk will focus on our current and future work, including efforts to encourage contributions from biomedical domain experts, to build custom applications that use Wikidata as the back-end knowledge base, and to promote CC0-licensing among biomedical knowledge resources. Comments, feedback and contributions are welcome at https://github.com/SuLab/genewikicentral and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/WD:MB.

Kindly,

Sarah R. Rodlund Senior Project Coordinator-Product & Technology, Wikimedia Foundation srodlund@wikimedia.org