Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for "interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily within any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and that you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se
Hi Eric
With a colleague we looked at the use of 'paintings' in the English edition of Wikipedia. I believe it is the first study of its type. Let me know if you want a preprint, which I am happy to share. best T
Image-based information: paintings in Wikipedia Trilce Navarrete, https://www-emerald-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/insight/search?q=Trilce Navarrete Elena Villaespesa https://www-emerald-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/insight/search?q=Elena Villaespesa
Journal of Documentation https://www-emerald-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/insight/publication/issn/0022-0418
ISSN: 0022-0418
Publication date: 26 October 2020
:..::...::..::...::..: Trilce Navarrete
m: +31 (0)6 244 84998 | s: trilcen | t: @trilcenavarrete w: trilcenavarrete.com
*Video series: Museums in Context https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbwAZPm1xXxB1nB2wRq3k6UsTyzGojdrJ* *Latest book: Handbook of Cultural Economics, Third Edition https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/handbook-of-cultural-economics-third-edition-9781788975797.html* *Blog: Economists Talk Art https://economiststalkart.org/*
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 2:44 PM Eric Luth eric.luth@wikimedia.se wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for "interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily within any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and that you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
In the human-computer interaction field, I'd highlight three seminal papers:
Viégas and Wattenberg's 2004 paper established Wikipedia as an area of study, and used novel visualization techniques to demonstrate how quickly vandalism is removed from the encyclopedia. Back in 2004, the main research question was probably "how does this thing even work?", particularly with regards to combating vandalism, and this paper starts the path of answering that question.
Priedhorsky et al's 2007 paper dug into authorship of content that is viewed, giving us good insights into the "who writes Wikipedia?" question. It asks some important questions around what "value" is in a peer-production community like Wikipedia (is content that is viewed more often more valuable?) There's also some cool methodological aspects of this paper (it uses MD5 checksums for revert detection, and there's now SHA1 checksums for all revision in Wikipedia's API).
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming in with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do quality assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
Another question that I find really interesting and that is perhaps often overlooked is "why did Wikipedia succeed?" It's easy to think that there were few or no other competitors in the online encyclopedia space at the time it got started, but there were a bunch of them. Mako Hill's PhD thesis has a chapter that looks at that https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf, and he also gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill about this.
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on the English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions, or across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point to. Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's important to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Cited papers:
- Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp. 575-582). - Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S. T. K., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., & Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work* (pp. 259-268). - Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*, *57*(5), 664-688. - Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013, February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work* (pp. 839-848). Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 05:44, Eric Luth eric.luth@wikimedia.se wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for "interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily within any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and that you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Morten Wang, 18/12/20 17:23:
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on the English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions, or across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point to.
For this I usually reference Felipe Ortega's dissertation of 2009, "Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis". All the basic trends were there to see already, and at the time it was the only cross-language study AFAIK (apart from Erik Zachte's statistics). https://burjcdigital.urjc.es/handle/10115/11239
It's also linked from: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Resources
Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's important to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Indeed.
Federico
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 16:23 skrev Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com:
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming in with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do quality assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
I think we need to start recommending it with a short explanation on current trends and mention that it describes a piece of Wikipedia history (where the mechanics behind the trend could still be relevant). You see the same curve in a number of other languages (especially languages mainly spoken in northern Europe), and like English they've typically flattened out, English already around 2014, other number of languages with a similar trend around 2018, yet we can still read that the Wikipedia editorship is in decline in the present tense in papers and articles on English Wikipedia published in 2020, referencing The Rise and Decline.
//Johan Jönsson --
When it comes to understanding relationships between multiple language editions, I think that Bao et al.'s work on Omnipedia has a bunch of great insights for how to think about and measure relationships between content in different editions.
Bao, P., Hecht, B., Carton, S., Quaderi, M., Horn, M., & Gergle, D. (2012). Omnipedia: Bridging the wikipedia language gap. *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems*, 1075–1084. https://doi.org/10.1145/2208516.2208553
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:00 AM Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com wrote:
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 16:23 skrev Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com:
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming
in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do
quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
I think we need to start recommending it with a short explanation on current trends and mention that it describes a piece of Wikipedia history (where the mechanics behind the trend could still be relevant). You see the same curve in a number of other languages (especially languages mainly spoken in northern Europe), and like English they've typically flattened out, English already around 2014, other number of languages with a similar trend around 2018, yet we can still read that the Wikipedia editorship is in decline in the present tense in papers and articles on English Wikipedia published in 2020, referencing The Rise and Decline.
//Johan Jönsson
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
In Wikidata we have annotated 1873 items (articles, books, etc.) as about Wikipedia. Some of them are listed in Scholia: https://scholia.toolforge.org/topic/Q52
Halfaker et al's "2013" paper, as mentioned, I would also mention.
Apart from that there is the famous Nature editorial article "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" from 2005 which may have contributed to Wikipedia rise. I think it is the most cited Wikipedia study. It has 3182 Google Scholar citations. And it is the most cited study among the Wikipedia works in Wikidata.
best regards Finn
On 18/12/2020 18.23, Jeremy Foote wrote:
When it comes to understanding relationships between multiple language editions, I think that Bao et al.'s work on Omnipedia has a bunch of great insights for how to think about and measure relationships between content in different editions.
Bao, P., Hecht, B., Carton, S., Quaderi, M., Horn, M., & Gergle, D. (2012). Omnipedia: Bridging the wikipedia language gap. *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems*, 1075–1084. https://doi.org/10.1145/2208516.2208553
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:00 AM Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com wrote:
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 16:23 skrev Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com:
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming
in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do
quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
I think we need to start recommending it with a short explanation on current trends and mention that it describes a piece of Wikipedia history (where the mechanics behind the trend could still be relevant). You see the same curve in a number of other languages (especially languages mainly spoken in northern Europe), and like English they've typically flattened out, English already around 2014, other number of languages with a similar trend around 2018, yet we can still read that the Wikipedia editorship is in decline in the present tense in papers and articles on English Wikipedia published in 2020, referencing The Rise and Decline.
//Johan Jönsson
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
Hello, I love the study about Wikipedia articles in different language versions, and the consequences for tourism in Spain accordlingly. The researchers improved articles about Spanish locations, and then the tourism there went up. Kind regards Ziko
Hinnosaar, Marit/Toomas Hinnosaar/Michael Kummer/Olga Slivko (2017): Does Wikipedia Matter? The effect of Wikipedia on Tourist Choices, Discussion Paper No. 15-089, Zentrum für Wirtschaftsforschung, http://ftp.zew.de.
Am Fr., 18. Dez. 2020 um 18:33 Uhr schrieb fn@imm.dtu.dk:
In Wikidata we have annotated 1873 items (articles, books, etc.) as about Wikipedia. Some of them are listed in Scholia: https://scholia.toolforge.org/topic/Q52
Halfaker et al's "2013" paper, as mentioned, I would also mention.
Apart from that there is the famous Nature editorial article "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" from 2005 which may have contributed to Wikipedia rise. I think it is the most cited Wikipedia study. It has 3182 Google Scholar citations. And it is the most cited study among the Wikipedia works in Wikidata.
best regards Finn
On 18/12/2020 18.23, Jeremy Foote wrote:
When it comes to understanding relationships between multiple language editions, I think that Bao et al.'s work on Omnipedia has a bunch of great insights for how to think about and measure relationships between content in different editions.
Bao, P., Hecht, B., Carton, S., Quaderi, M., Horn, M., & Gergle, D. (2012). Omnipedia: Bridging the wikipedia language gap. *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems*, 1075–1084. https://doi.org/10.1145/2208516.2208553
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:00 AM Johan Jönsson brevlistor@gmail.com wrote:
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 16:23 skrev Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com:
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming
in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do
quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
I think we need to start recommending it with a short explanation on current trends and mention that it describes a piece of Wikipedia history (where the mechanics behind the trend could still be relevant). You see the same curve in a number of other languages (especially languages mainly spoken in northern Europe), and like English they've typically flattened out, English already around 2014, other number of languages with a similar trend around 2018, yet we can still read that the Wikipedia editorship is in decline in the present tense in papers and articles on English Wikipedia published in 2020, referencing The Rise and Decline.
//Johan Jönsson
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
Re. non-English Wikipedia and editor retention: I ran a large-scale field experiment in and with the community of Swiss editors. We show that purely symbolic awards that provide social recognition increase newcomer retention by 20%, and the effect persists for over a year after initial award receipt:
Gallus, J. (2017). " Fostering public good contributions with symbolic awards: A large-scale natural field experiment at Wikipedia ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2540 )." Management Science 63(12): 3999-4015.
Would you mind sharing the eventual article with us? I greatly enjoyed following this thread and look forward to the article.
On Fri, Dec 18th, 2020 at 9:39 AM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I love the study about Wikipedia articles in different language versions, and the consequences for tourism in Spain accordlingly. The researchers improved articles about Spanish locations, and then the tourism there went up. Kind regards Ziko
Hinnosaar, Marit/Toomas Hinnosaar/Michael Kummer/Olga Slivko (2017): Does Wikipedia Matter? The effect of Wikipedia on Tourist Choices, Discussion Paper No. 15-089, Zentrum für Wirtschaftsforschung, http://ftp.zew.de.
Am Fr., 18. Dez. 2020 um 18:33 Uhr schrieb < fn@imm.dtu.dk >:
In Wikidata we have annotated 1873 items (articles, books, etc.) as about Wikipedia. Some of them are listed in Scholia: https://scholia.toolforge.org/topic/Q52
Halfaker et al's "2013" paper, as mentioned, I would also mention.
Apart from that there is the famous Nature editorial article "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head" from 2005 which may have contributed to Wikipedia rise. I think it is the most cited Wikipedia study. It has 3182 Google Scholar citations. And it is the most cited study among the Wikipedia works in Wikidata.
best regards Finn
On 18/12/2020 18.23, Jeremy Foote wrote: When it comes to understanding relationships between multiple language
editions, I think that Bao et al.'s work on Omnipedia has a bunch of
great
insights for how to think about and measure relationships between
content
in different editions.
Bao, P., Hecht, B., Carton, S., Quaderi, M., Horn, M., & Gergle, D.
(2012).
Omnipedia: Bridging the wikipedia language gap. *Proceedings of the
2012
ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems*,
1075–1084.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2208516.2208553
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:00 AM Johan Jönsson < brevlistor@gmail.com >
wrote:
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 16:23 skrev Morten Wang < nettrom@gmail.com >:
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the
Wikipedia
community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality
assurance
processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content
coming
in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do
quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who
are
struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions
(see
also the Teahouse paper).
I think we need to start recommending it with a short explanation on current trends and mention that it describes a piece of Wikipedia
history
(where the mechanics behind the trend could still be relevant). You
see the
same curve in a number of other languages (especially languages
mainly
spoken in northern Europe), and like English they've typically
flattened
out, English already around 2014, other number of languages with a
similar
trend around 2018, yet we can still read that the Wikipedia
editorship is
in decline in the present tense in papers and articles on English
Wikipedia
published in 2020, referencing The Rise and Decline.
//Johan Jönsson
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
A few more for consideration:
Keegan et al.'s work on how editors collaborate around breaking news events https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764212469367 (I expect this to get cited a lot in the next year or so, with increased interest in the role of Wikipedia in combating COVID disinformation)
Forte et al's work on the way emergent, nested institutions within Wikipedia function https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260103 and their key role in supporting content quality and distributed decision-making. Lots of great theory-building, and an excellent example of the depth of insight that qualitative research can produce.
In terms of newer stuff, I really admire Marc Miquel-Ribe and David Laniado's methodology for mapping gaps in Wikipedia content across languages https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2018.00054/full. And I think their starting point (what is the Wikipedia content that naturally belongs within the "cultural context" of a group of language speakers?) is maybe the best approach I've found for tackling the thorny questions around defining and addressing knowledge gaps.
Also in terms of newer stuff... the Wikimedia Research showcase page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase is a great place to start one's explorations :)
- Jonathan
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 7:23 AM Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com wrote:
In the human-computer interaction field, I'd highlight three seminal papers:
Viégas and Wattenberg's 2004 paper established Wikipedia as an area of study, and used novel visualization techniques to demonstrate how quickly vandalism is removed from the encyclopedia. Back in 2004, the main research question was probably "how does this thing even work?", particularly with regards to combating vandalism, and this paper starts the path of answering that question.
Priedhorsky et al's 2007 paper dug into authorship of content that is viewed, giving us good insights into the "who writes Wikipedia?" question. It asks some important questions around what "value" is in a peer-production community like Wikipedia (is content that is viewed more often more valuable?) There's also some cool methodological aspects of this paper (it uses MD5 checksums for revert detection, and there's now SHA1 checksums for all revision in Wikipedia's API).
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming in with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do quality assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
Another question that I find really interesting and that is perhaps often overlooked is "why did Wikipedia succeed?" It's easy to think that there were few or no other competitors in the online encyclopedia space at the time it got started, but there were a bunch of them. Mako Hill's PhD thesis has a chapter that looks at that https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf, and he also gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill about this.
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on the English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions, or across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point to. Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's important to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Cited papers:
- Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying
cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp. 575-582).
- Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S. T. K., Panciera, K., Terveen, L., &
Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work* (pp. 259-268).
- Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The
rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*, *57*(5), 664-688.
- Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013,
February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work* (pp. 839-848). Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 05:44, Eric Luth eric.luth@wikimedia.se wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's largest daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me for "interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily
within
any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and
that
you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se _______________________________________________ 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
Thanks all for your great examples! Very helpful – and also interesting to follow.
Best, *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se
Den fre 18 dec. 2020 kl 22:35 skrev Jonathan Morgan < jonnymorgan.esq@gmail.com>:
A few more for consideration:
Keegan et al.'s work on how editors collaborate around breaking news events https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764212469367 (I expect this to get cited a lot in the next year or so, with increased interest in the role of Wikipedia in combating COVID disinformation)
Forte et al's work on the way emergent, nested institutions within Wikipedia function https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260103 and their key role in supporting content quality and distributed decision-making. Lots of great theory-building, and an excellent example of the depth of insight that qualitative research can produce.
In terms of newer stuff, I really admire Marc Miquel-Ribe and David Laniado's methodology for mapping gaps in Wikipedia content across languages https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2018.00054/full. And I think their starting point (what is the Wikipedia content that naturally belongs within the "cultural context" of a group of language speakers?) is maybe the best approach I've found for tackling the thorny questions around defining and addressing knowledge gaps.
Also in terms of newer stuff... the Wikimedia Research showcase page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase is a great place to start one's explorations :)
- Jonathan
On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 7:23 AM Morten Wang nettrom@gmail.com wrote:
In the human-computer interaction field, I'd highlight three seminal papers:
Viégas and Wattenberg's 2004 paper established Wikipedia as an area of study, and used novel visualization techniques to demonstrate how quickly vandalism is removed from the encyclopedia. Back in 2004, the main
research
question was probably "how does this thing even work?", particularly with regards to combating vandalism, and this paper starts the path of
answering
that question.
Priedhorsky et al's 2007 paper dug into authorship of content that is viewed, giving us good insights into the "who writes Wikipedia?"
question.
It asks some important questions around what "value" is in a peer-production community like Wikipedia (is content that is viewed more often more valuable?) There's also some cool methodological aspects of
this
paper (it uses MD5 checksums for revert detection, and there's now SHA1 checksums for all revision in Wikipedia's API).
Halfaker et al's 2013 paper digs deeply into answering why the Wikipedia community started declining in 2007. They find that the quality assurance processes that were created to deal with the firehose of content coming
in
with the exponential growth around 2004–2005 also end up discarding good-faith contributions. This highlights the problem of how to do
quality
assurance while also being a welcoming community to newcomers who are struggling to learn all of Wikipedia's various rules and conventions (see also the Teahouse paper).
Another question that I find really interesting and that is perhaps often overlooked is "why did Wikipedia succeed?" It's easy to think that there were few or no other competitors in the online encyclopedia space at the time it got started, but there were a bunch of them. Mako Hill's PhD
thesis
has a chapter that looks at that https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf, and he also gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/10/makohill about this.
One thing I've noticed is that all the papers I'm referencing focus on
the
English Wikipedia. When it comes to studies of other language editions,
or
across multiple ones, I've struggled to come up with a key paper to point to. Hopefully someone else chimes in and fills that hole, as it's
important
to recognize that "Wikipedia" doesn't equal the English one.
Cited papers:
- Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying
cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In *Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems* (pp. 575-582).
- Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S. T. K., Panciera, K., Terveen,
L., &
Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and restoring value
in
Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work* (pp. 259-268).
- Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The
rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. *American Behavioral Scientist*, *57*(5), 664-688.
- Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013,
February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer
supported
cooperative work* (pp. 839-848). Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology,
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 05:44, Eric Luth eric.luth@wikimedia.se wrote:
Dear all,
A Swedish professor is writing a piece on Wikipedia for Sweden's
largest
daily newspaper, for the upcoming 20 years anniversary. She asked me
for
"interesting and widespread studies" on Wikipedia – not necessarily
within
any certain focus.
If you would share 2 or 3 studies, that have gained some attention and
that
you find interesting, which would these be?
Would be very happy for any help!
Best *Eric Luth* Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement
and
Advocacy Wikimedia Sverige eric.luth@wikimedia.se +46 (0) 765 55 50 95
Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige. Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org