regional KPIs - Wiki-research-l

24 Jan 2017

As previously came up in discussion about chapters, it would be very useful
to have national data about Wikipedia activities, which can be determined
(generally) from IP addresses. Now I understand the privacy argument in
relation to logged-in users (not saying I agree with it though in relation
to aggregate data). However, can we find a proxy that does not have the
privacy considerations.

My hypothesis is that national content is predominantly written by users
resident in that nation. And that therefore activity on national content can
be used as a proxy for national user editing activity. 

In the case of Australia, we could describe Australian national content in
either of two ways: articles within the closure of the
[[Category:Australia]] and/or those tagged as  {{WikiProject Australia}}.
There are arguments for/against either (neither is perfect, in my experience
the category closure will tend to have false positives and the project will
tend to have false negatives).

I would like to know what correlation exists between national editor
activity (as determined from IP addresses mapped to location) and national
content edits and if/how it changes over time for various nations. This is
research that only WMF can do because WMF has the IP addresses and the rest
of us can't have them for privacy reasons.

If we could establish that a strong-enough correlation existed between them,
we could use national content activity (for which there is no privacy
consideration) as a proxy for national editing activity. And we might even
be able to come up with a multiplier for each nation to provide comparable
data for national editing activity.

Now, it may be that we need to restrict the edits themselves in some way to
maximise the correlations between national content and same-nation editor
activity.

My second hypothesis is "semantic" edits (e.g. edits that add large amounts
of content or citation) to national content will be more highly correlated
with same-nation editors than "syntactic" edits (e.g. fix spelling,
punctuation or Manual of Style issues) will be. I suspect most bots and
other automated/semi-automated edits are doing syntactic edits.

Now, some of you will probably be aware of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-01-17/Recen
t_research Female Wikipedians aren't more likely to edit women biographies].
So it may well be that my patriotic-editing hypothesis is also untrue. But
it would be nice to know one way or the other.

Kerry