Building an academic network for Wikimedia - Wiki-research-l

1 Apr 2008

(This is a forwarded email from foundation-l list.)

After the third "experiment" on sr.wp, I have to say that cooperation
between particular professors, their students and one of Wikimedia
projects is working very well.

The first project started with professors Cvetana Krstev and Dusko
Vitas from Mathematical and Philological faculties in Belgrade. As I
am not involved in that project (and I don't know for details), I will
skip it. I only know that a number of students' works in computational
linguistics were published on Serbian Wikipedia.

The second was initiated by professor Slobdan Macura (a Wikipedian,
too), who asked me to make a presentation of Wikipedia to students of
the third and the fourth year of physical chemistry. This cooperation
gave to us a number of very good articles about chemistry of proteins
[1]. While half of them are translated from the English Wikipedia, the
rest are original encyclopedic works made by students. For example, an
article about Anfinsen's dogma is much better in Serbian [2] than in
English [3].

When I started to finish my studies in linguistics (last September), I
found that some of my professors are interested in adapting their own
rules to contribution to Wikipedia. The best cooperation I made with
my professor in sociolinguistics, Jelena Filipovic. Her students have
to make three types of works: three short forms, usually what a
student thinks about something, one longer form on what student thinks
about one of specific texts and a seminar work, which should be the
longest form.

(By accident, at the same time Linguistlist called linguists to
contribute articles in sociolinguistics.)

Professor's and mine first target was to change three short forms to
three articles. Almost a half of the students (something less than 20
of something more than 40) opted in to that change. And not only that:
a couple of them opted to change their seminar work to one longer
article.

A week ago the first short forms were finished. Two students sent to
me articles. Yesterday I started to analyze them in depth. And I have
to say that articles are real success! I processed the first three
articles and here is the report:

- Dialect atlas (or "Linguistic map" -- two names for the same term).
Article in Serbian [4] is much longer than article in English [5].
- Linguistic interview. Article in Serbian exists [6], while article
in English doesn't exist.
- Language variable (a fairly important linguistic term) now exists in
Serbian [7], but doesn't exist in English.

The main consequence of such work is that we are able to move our sum
of knowledge at the next level. While a number of smaller Wikipedias
have problems with very basic articles, which may be covered by high
school students, thanks to such cooperation we are able to put into
Wikipedia more specific knowledge.

* * *

However, the situation is not sustainable. While I am able and I am
willing to work with some number of professors, I am not able cover
even my faculty alone. While initiating cooperation is a time
consuming task, it is a temporary task. I am willing to spend a couple
of weeks or a couple of months in making a cooperation alive, but when
an initiation of cooperation is finished, I may start do work on other
one.

However, if I have to take care separately about all groups all the
time, I would be able to work with five or ten groups, but not much
more.

Instead of that kind of organization, I think that it would be much
better to make some kind of a global "academic network for Wikimedia".
For the first time it should be one network for sharing resources: to
explain how to find priorities for writing articles, to make some
comprehensive manuals for professors and students, to show to
professors and students how to find an online help as well as how to
find real-life help.

Also, such network may be very useful for professors and students:
While at the first time such network would be able to connect a
linguist from Serbia with a biologist from Germany (which is not so
useful), as time is passing, this network would be able to make
connections between people who are working on the same topics.
Actually, if people from Linguistlist (those who already made calls
for contributing to Wikipedia) are interested in joining to such
network, we will already make the first connections between linguists.

* * *

I am not sure was here a similar talk. However, I know that Wikimedian
community has a number of university professors and other experts. And
those professors and experts should be the front persons of such
network. Of course, I am willing to help, but we need to make a group
of relevant people who would attract other professors and experts to
join the group (and groups in the future).

* * *

There is one anecdote about Stalin. Some of the persons in charge for
foreign relations came to him:
- An emissary from Vatican came. What should we do?
- How many tanks do they have?
- None.
- Take them away!

So, whenever someone came with an idea to add some number of articles
to Serbian Wikipedia, I was making jokes which were beginning with
"How many tanks do thay have?" -- in the sense of a number of
articles, of course.

While it is obvious that 10 good articles are much better than 100
bad, it is, also, obvious that we have to find a way how to make a
"mass production" of good articles. When I say "mass production", I
think about a systematic effort for improving quality of our project.

And if there are three articles covered systematically by students on
Serbian Wikipedia which are better than corresponding three articles
on English Wikipedia (actually, two of them don't exist), then it is
obvious that all Wikipedias need such systematic effort.

I presented above my idea for making such systematic effort. It came
to my mind yesterday, which means that it is far from a rounded idea.
I didn't even thought about other possibilities. So, a question for
discussion here is: Do you have some better idea? Does such thing
exist? Do you think that this idea is good enough for implementation?
If so, are there people (especially professors and experts) who are
willing to participate?

* * *

[1] - The list of articles and students who made them is here:
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB:%D0%A4%D0…
[2] -
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%…
[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anfinsen%27s_dogma
[4] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijalektolo%C5%A1ki_atlas
[5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_atlas
[6] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervju_(lingvistika)
[7] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezi%C4%8Dka_varijacija