The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Hi Pine,
My response is not directly related to editor contributions to Japanese Wikipedia but you may still be interested to know:
We are aiming to learn more about Japanese Wikipedia readers (aim = we're interested, we asked a member of the Japanese Wikipedia community to help us translate the survey and other documentation to Japanese). You can follow the task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T151835 This is a follow up on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... to assess whether the results of that study holds true across languages. The other languages we're considering are Spanish, Hindi, and maybe Arabic (the list of languages is not fixed at this moment, but we do have translations for Spanish and Hindi ready as well).
Anyhow, follow up the task if you're interested to keep track of it. :)
Best, Leila
On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 12:22 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_and_Pinchuk)/Englis...
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Yusuke,
It's nice to hear from you. I remember you from our time on the IEG Committee together.
ENWP has its share of bots and sockpuppets too, but I still think Japanese Wikipedia has some good statistics.
Let's consider the 100+ edits/month users. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, Japanese Wikipedia has 372 by last count, which is the 6th highest of all language Wikipedias. Now let's look at these ratios:
English Wikipedia: 3340 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 1500M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.227 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
Japanese Wikipedia: 372 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 132M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.818 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
So even by that measure, Japanese Wikipedia is doing relatively well.
Perhaps there are Japanese universities that WMF could contact about the possibility of doing this kind of research, and WMF could provide funding if necessary. (Here in the US, I believe that some similar work is funded by the National Science Foundation; perhaps there is a similar source of funding for research in Japan that could also be asked for funding for the project). I'm not sure who at WMF would need to support this kind of work for it to go forward, but I think that Dario is at least open to the idea. Perhaps he'd be willing to have a conversation with you about how to set up this kind of research project; I for one would be interested in in the findings.
Pine
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_ and_Pinchuk)/English
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I think this is an interesting idea, Pine. Thanks for bringing it up. I imagine that you could learn a lot from a few long-term, highly active Japanese Wikipedians by talking to them about how we have <problem/solution/process/policy> in English Wiki (and/or other wikis that are discussed often in the research lit) and learning where they see differences in their jawiki.
Resource-wise, this would be difficult to get on the plates of the WMF Research team. Personally, I spend a lot more time operating as infrastructure for other people's research and tool development (see ORES[1]) than doing my own research projects. I think that's generally true of people on our team. However, I'd love to *help* someone else look into this. I think I could do a pretty good job of connecting the English Wikipedia-focused peer-review lit to casual discussions of Wikipedia stuff. I could also probably help pull in some other academics to help flesh out references to the academic lit. Pine, maybe you could kick off the project by posting a set of questions about Japanese Wikipedia on a wiki page and trying to see if you can find a Japanese Wikipedian willing to give their perspective. Here are some of my own questions:
* Do you do anything like subject-focused WikiProjects? * Why, do you suspect, that your new article survival rate is so high?[1] * How do you help newcomers figure out how things work (rules, processes, jargon, etc.)? * How do you find and address the most persistent cases of vandalism and other bad-faith activities? * Do you have essays like we do in English Wikipedia? If so, which are your personal favorites and why? * What gadgets and 3rd party tools do you use? Which tools seem to be popular?
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_article_creation
-Aaron
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 2:05 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Yusuke,
It's nice to hear from you. I remember you from our time on the IEG Committee together.
ENWP has its share of bots and sockpuppets too, but I still think Japanese Wikipedia has some good statistics.
Let's consider the 100+ edits/month users. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, Japanese Wikipedia has 372 by last count, which is the 6th highest of all language Wikipedias. Now let's look at these ratios:
English Wikipedia: 3340 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 1500M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.227 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
Japanese Wikipedia: 372 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 132M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.818 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
So even by that measure, Japanese Wikipedia is doing relatively well.
Perhaps there are Japanese universities that WMF could contact about the possibility of doing this kind of research, and WMF could provide funding if necessary. (Here in the US, I believe that some similar work is funded by the National Science Foundation; perhaps there is a similar source of funding for research in Japan that could also be asked for funding for the project). I'm not sure who at WMF would need to support this kind of work for it to go forward, but I think that Dario is at least open to the idea. Perhaps he'd be willing to have a conversation with you about how to set up this kind of research project; I for one would be interested in in the findings.
Pine
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_and _Pinchuk)/English
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the ideas. I have plenty of my own big projects right now, including finishing Cascadia Wikimedians' accounting and grant report for 2016 and the LearnWiki project, so it's likely to be many months before I have the bandwidth to start a new project.
In the longer term, this project would fit with my interests in expanding the number of Wikimedia community contributors. If something like a Growth Team is reconstituted at WMF then I would hope that projects like this would be on their agenda.
Unless Dario or Yusuke feel like they have the capacity personally and/or with their colleagues to take on this project (perhaps, in Yusuke's case, with the support of a WMF project grant), it's likely to go into my extensive backlog of wish-list projects.
Pine
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is an interesting idea, Pine. Thanks for bringing it up. I imagine that you could learn a lot from a few long-term, highly active Japanese Wikipedians by talking to them about how we have <problem/solution/process/policy> in English Wiki (and/or other wikis that are discussed often in the research lit) and learning where they see differences in their jawiki.
Resource-wise, this would be difficult to get on the plates of the WMF Research team. Personally, I spend a lot more time operating as infrastructure for other people's research and tool development (see ORES[1]) than doing my own research projects. I think that's generally true of people on our team. However, I'd love to *help* someone else look into this. I think I could do a pretty good job of connecting the English Wikipedia-focused peer-review lit to casual discussions of Wikipedia stuff. I could also probably help pull in some other academics to help flesh out references to the academic lit. Pine, maybe you could kick off the project by posting a set of questions about Japanese Wikipedia on a wiki page and trying to see if you can find a Japanese Wikipedian willing to give their perspective. Here are some of my own questions:
- Do you do anything like subject-focused WikiProjects?
- Why, do you suspect, that your new article survival rate is so high?[1]
- How do you help newcomers figure out how things work (rules, processes,
jargon, etc.)?
- How do you find and address the most persistent cases of vandalism and
other bad-faith activities?
- Do you have essays like we do in English Wikipedia? If so, which are
your personal favorites and why?
- What gadgets and 3rd party tools do you use? Which tools seem to be
popular?
-Aaron
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 2:05 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Yusuke,
It's nice to hear from you. I remember you from our time on the IEG Committee together.
ENWP has its share of bots and sockpuppets too, but I still think Japanese Wikipedia has some good statistics.
Let's consider the 100+ edits/month users. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, Japanese Wikipedia has 372 by last count, which is the 6th highest of all language Wikipedias. Now let's look at these ratios:
English Wikipedia: 3340 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 1500M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.227 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
Japanese Wikipedia: 372 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 132M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.818 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
So even by that measure, Japanese Wikipedia is doing relatively well.
Perhaps there are Japanese universities that WMF could contact about the possibility of doing this kind of research, and WMF could provide funding if necessary. (Here in the US, I believe that some similar work is funded by the National Science Foundation; perhaps there is a similar source of funding for research in Japan that could also be asked for funding for the project). I'm not sure who at WMF would need to support this kind of work for it to go forward, but I think that Dario is at least open to the idea. Perhaps he'd be willing to have a conversation with you about how to set up this kind of research project; I for one would be interested in in the findings.
Pine
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_and _Pinchuk)/English
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Ideally, editors that participate in multiple communities, could update and create pages at Metawiki, giving details related to things like this. E.g. This old page has barely changed in 10 years. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Wikipedia It would be good to know the successes/challenges/unique-aspects of *all* the wikis, and that can only happen if we approach it somewhat more methodically. (Sidenote: I see that this page, and the similar ones, don't have any incoming links (orphaned), which might explain why they haven't seen much activity at all.)
I'd suggest adding your thoughts to an idealab page, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas because you don't have to lead the idea, you just have to add sufficient details that it makes sense to someone who /might/ want to lead it! (per first point in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/How_it_works#How_to_participa... ) Use a single language Wikipedia as an example, but make it clear (and frame the questions and details and links) that full coverage is the goal, so that it is easier to extrapolate later to all languages/projects.
This is also something that the Chapters/Affiliates would probably be able to help a lot with. Once you've got some ideas sketched out, and refined a bit, reach out to them, and perhaps you'll find the eventual idea leader in there.
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Aaron,
Thanks for the ideas. I have plenty of my own big projects right now, including finishing Cascadia Wikimedians' accounting and grant report for 2016 and the LearnWiki project, so it's likely to be many months before I have the bandwidth to start a new project.
In the longer term, this project would fit with my interests in expanding the number of Wikimedia community contributors. If something like a Growth Team is reconstituted at WMF then I would hope that projects like this would be on their agenda.
Unless Dario or Yusuke feel like they have the capacity personally and/or with their colleagues to take on this project (perhaps, in Yusuke's case, with the support of a WMF project grant), it's likely to go into my extensive backlog of wish-list projects.
Pine
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is an interesting idea, Pine. Thanks for bringing it up. I imagine that you could learn a lot from a few long-term, highly active Japanese Wikipedians by talking to them about how we have <problem/solution/process/policy> in English Wiki (and/or other wikis that are discussed often in the research lit) and learning where they see differences in their jawiki.
Resource-wise, this would be difficult to get on the plates of the WMF Research team. Personally, I spend a lot more time operating as infrastructure for other people's research and tool development (see ORES[1]) than doing my own research projects. I think that's generally true of people on our team. However, I'd love to *help* someone else look into this. I think I could do a pretty good job of connecting the English Wikipedia-focused peer-review lit to casual discussions of Wikipedia stuff. I could also probably help pull in some other academics to help flesh out references to the academic lit. Pine, maybe you could kick off the project by posting a set of questions about Japanese Wikipedia on a wiki page and trying to see if you can find a Japanese Wikipedian willing to give their perspective. Here are some of my own questions:
- Do you do anything like subject-focused WikiProjects?
- Why, do you suspect, that your new article survival rate is so high?[1]
- How do you help newcomers figure out how things work (rules, processes,
jargon, etc.)?
- How do you find and address the most persistent cases of vandalism and
other bad-faith activities?
- Do you have essays like we do in English Wikipedia? If so, which are
your personal favorites and why?
- What gadgets and 3rd party tools do you use? Which tools seem to be
popular?
-Aaron
On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 2:05 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Yusuke,
It's nice to hear from you. I remember you from our time on the IEG Committee together.
ENWP has its share of bots and sockpuppets too, but I still think Japanese Wikipedia has some good statistics.
Let's consider the 100+ edits/month users. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, Japanese Wikipedia has 372 by last count, which is the 6th highest of all language Wikipedias. Now let's look at these ratios:
English Wikipedia: 3340 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 1500M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.227 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
Japanese Wikipedia: 372 editors with 100+ edits/month, divided by 132M prim+sec speakers, gives us a ratio of about 2.818 highly active editors per million prim+sec speakers.
So even by that measure, Japanese Wikipedia is doing relatively well.
Perhaps there are Japanese universities that WMF could contact about the possibility of doing this kind of research, and WMF could provide funding if necessary. (Here in the US, I believe that some similar work is funded by the National Science Foundation; perhaps there is a similar source of funding for research in Japan that could also be asked for funding for the project). I'm not sure who at WMF would need to support this kind of work for it to go forward, but I think that Dario is at least open to the idea. Perhaps he'd be willing to have a conversation with you about how to set up this kind of research project; I for one would be interested in in the findings.
Pine
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
Hi Pine,
I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Are you thinking of qualitative research or quantitative research? Regarding the former, the question reminded me of a research project on the history of the Russian Wikipedia and other wikis (lead by Maryana Pinchuk in 2011) which might serve as a reference point. [1][2]
From the project's description:
Across the globe, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikipedia projects, plus many sister projects such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Commons. Why are the communities behind some of these projects still experiencing rapid growth while others are leveling off or gradually declining? How have different communities of volunteers overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities learn from each other in order to make every project more healthy?
I would be interested in how much resources (if any) the WMF provided to the research project, and how much effort from the communities was needed. An experienced Japanese Wikipedian and me floated the idea of something similar for Japanese Wikipedia one or two years ago - at least regarding the community resources, we were not sure how we can secure the time and energy required for such a study, especially from the few volunteers qualified to do so and who tend to be already busy for other Wikimedia-related volunteer work.
Also, regarding "a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site", this might not be as great as it might look like. The number comes from the number of accounts with 5+ edits in a month. Sockpuppets and throwaway accounts could easily skew this number (and sadly they are incentivized to do so because of a 5-edit requirement in the voting rules). If you look at the proportion of the 100+ edit users, Japanese Wikipedia is not as high.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History_(Doronina_and _Pinchuk)/English
-Yusuke
On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
The topic of audiences was discussed at today's WMF Metrics and Activities meeting.
Looking at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, and sorting by editors (5+ per million speakers), there are some language communities that appear to have high participation rates on their language's edition of Wikipedia, but I hear very little from them in meta discussions. Japanese Wikipedia comes to mind in particular, with its large number of primary + secondary language speakers. I'd be interested in learning more about what makes their community's edition of Wikipedia so successful in terms of a high proportion of Japanese speakers contributing to the site, that could be applied to other language editions.
Could WMF direct more resources to studying the successes on Japanese Wikipedia, and how information about those successes could be applied to other language editions of Wikipedia?
Pine
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