Hi everyone,

We sent a separate e-mail introducing our systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in English.

We hope that our review would provide useful insights for the research community. Thus, we would like to ask your help in reviewing the research questions we have developed for the data extraction and synthesis phases of our review. Currently, we address the following review research questions:

1. What high-quality research has been conducted with Wikipedia as a major topic or data source? As mentioned in the introductory e-mail, we have already identified over 2,100 studies, though we will only analyze the journal articles and doctoral theses in detail. We will group the articles by field of study.

2. What research questions have been asked by various sources, both academic scholarly and practitioner? We want to know both the subjects that the existing research has covered, and also catalogue key questions that practitioners would like to be answered, whether or not academic research has broached these questions. Also, we categorize the research questions based on their purposes. We have more comments on this research question below.

3. What theoretical frameworks and reference theories have been used to study the topic? We are very interested in theory-driven research on Wikipedia, and would like to identify and categorize such work.

4. What research designs have been employed to answer research questions? By "research design", we include all that is commonly called research "methodologies" or "approaches".

5. What kinds of data have been collected for research purposes? Specifically, we note the data collection techniques, the time dimension (one-time snapshot or longitudinal observations over time), the unit of analysis, the technique used for extracting Wikipedia data (e.g. live Wikipedia or Wikipedia clone server), the Wikipedia page type, and the Wikipedia language.

6. What conclusions have been made from existing research? That is, what questions from RQ2 have been answered, and what are these answers?

7. What questions from RQ2 are left unanswered? (These present directions for future research.)

Do you have any comments or feedback on these questions? On one hand, we want to extract useful data from the studies that could be helpful to researchers. On the other hand, we have to be pragmatic, considering what we can cover when we're dealing with over 600 peer-reviewed studies.

Beyond these basic questions, we have a special note regarding our RQ2, on the research questions that have been asked. In addition to the research questions that we extract from the articles, we want to know what questions are of interest that have not been studied. For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related research questions. Of note to academics and researchers is the collection at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Questi.... Could you please review this list and update that page directly with any additional questions? Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could update the list.

In addition, we are even more interested in questions that practitioners are asking, other than what researchers are asking. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are also Wikipedia "practitioners", we define practitioner here as someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly researcher.) Thus, we are sending a separate e-mail to wikipedia-l, foundation-l, and wikiEN-l asking them to update the list of Foundation research questions at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals.

Thanks for your help.

Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content....) Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada