A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today: how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On #wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and can hurt performance if enabled.
Any other thoughts?
On 11/28/06, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today: how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On #wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and can hurt performance if enabled.
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&...
may give a very very weak indication that the talk pages are almost never accessed - compared to wikipedia articles itself.
According to Wikicharts, only talk:Main page ranks in the top 1000 pages on Wikipedia. It's at #588.
On 11/28/06, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/28/06, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today: how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On #wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and can hurt performance if enabled.
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&...
may give a very very weak indication that the talk pages are almost never accessed - compared to wikipedia articles itself.
Joseph Reagle wrote:
A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today: how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On #wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and can hurt performance if enabled.
Any other thoughts?
Will it really hurt us if we enable those statistics? Or is this just one of those 'wiki-urban-mythgs'?
And yes, it's just one more thing we don't know about ourselves... I wonder if I should send another 'status enquiry' about the GUS :> It looks less and less likely we will do it this year :(
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Piotr Konieczny wrote:
Joseph Reagle wrote:
A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today: how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On #wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and can hurt performance if enabled.
Any other thoughts?
Will it really hurt us if we enable those statistics? Or is this just one of those 'wiki-urban-mythgs'?
20k extra writes per second to the database? Yeah, that'd hurt us.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
20k extra writes per second to the database? Yeah, that'd hurt us.
How about a very small sample? Would an extra 40 (~=1/512) writes per second be more feasible?
Jeremy
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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On 28 Nov 2006 at 22:47 Joseph Reagle wrote:
A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable.
I have been doing research on Wikipedia for about 2.5 years, and I have met many users of Wikipedia that had no idea that it was not authored by experts and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that). I have been putting this off because I am too busy at work at the moment. However, if time permits I will go ahead, do it, and make the results publicly available.
The questions I have been thinking about are rather simple (and I would like to keep it simple; comments appreciated):
(1) On the person:
- Male/Female - Age - Education - Computer literacy
(2) On Wikipedia:
- Do you know Wikipedia? - Do you use Wikipedia? - How often do you use Wikipedia? - You find an error in Wikipedia and would really like to have it corrected. What would you do? (Is this a leading question?)
Any comments?
Cheers, Josef.
On 11/30/06, Josef Kolbitsch josef.kolbitsch@tugraz.at wrote:
I have been doing research on Wikipedia for about 2.5 years, and I have met many users of Wikipedia that had no idea that it was not authored by experts
The aspect that is differenciating between Wikipedia and, hmm, let's say Britannica is not the question of experts editing. At Wikipedia, experts are editing without payment and secondly, the expert does not have to prove his skills before he/she is granted write access to Wikipedia. In the past years of my work, I have met quite a lot of people who don't have the slightest idea how traditional encyclopedias are written.
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
Have fun, Mathias
Dear all,
2006/11/30, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com:
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
we included a number of these and related questions in our current (German) survey of Wikipedia readers/visitors [1, 2], although we do not ask about other encyclopedias. The survey is available here (thanks to Jakob Voss!):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Leserumfrage
I'm afraid, however, that our own resources in recruiting a representative sample of readers are somewhat limited. Any help is greatly appreciated... ;-)
Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
Joachim
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/123/ [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.deutsch/17765/
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in. If I were reviewing a paper, I would be quite skeptical of claims about "Wikipedia readers" because how people understand information, the Internet, and collaborative technologies is culturally constructed.
It seems more relevant anyhow to be able to say, for example, we think this is how middle-class secondary school students in the US and England are thinking about Wikipedia. Or this is how professional journalists in Germany are thinking about Wikipedia. More targeted sampling provides purchase for interpreting the results in a culturally relevant fashion.
Andrea
On 11/30/06, Joachim Schroer joachim.schroer@googlemail.com wrote:
Dear all,
2006/11/30, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com:
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
we included a number of these and related questions in our current (German) survey of Wikipedia readers/visitors [1, 2], although we do not ask about other encyclopedias. The survey is available here (thanks to Jakob Voss!):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Leserumfrage
I'm afraid, however, that our own resources in recruiting a representative sample of readers are somewhat limited. Any help is greatly appreciated... ;-)
Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
Joachim
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/123/ [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.deutsch/17765/
-- Joachim Schroer, Dipl.-Psych. University of Wuerzburg Department of Psychology II, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Roentgenring 10 97070 Wuerzburg Germany
Phone: +49 931 31 6062 Fax: +49 931 31 6063 http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/staff/schroer.php schroer@psychologie.uni-wuerzurg.de _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Thursday 30 November 2006 07:51, Andrea Forte wrote:
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in.
This issue and the sheer size of WP prompted me to consider looking at smaller communities on the WP. However, my efforts weren't terribly productive.
[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/ethno/leadership.html
In this time I also sought out and considered "small neighborhoods" of articles and collaborators, eventually settling upon the corpus of Harry Potter pages given the project's coherence, liveliness and my own, earlier, experience of advocating for a reform in how readers should be warned of the possibility of spoilers (i.e., having a plot of a new book spoiled when consulting a Harry Potter article).
On a suggestion, I developed a brief questionnaire to engage with editors of the Harry Potter Project pages but, as expected, received few responses. Open content communities are, presently, often studied (with similar questionnaires) and participants might have little interest in taking time away from their actual (volunteer) work to respond to yet another. (As a participant, I have never responded to such a questionnaire.) Contacting actual participants can be difficult as well, as Lorenzon (2005) noted: "Many editors have their own user page which give information about them but few give out their real names and contact information." I made my solicitation on the Talk page for the Project as well as the Talk pages of a handful of prominent editors, without much success. Additionally, because most all the discourse is public and the community is otherwise so reflective, there is an abundance of existing data situated in actual practice. This is not to say such research discussions are not useful; once I developed my questions I was interested in receiving answers and the single response was informative. Fortunately, while responses to questionnaires can be hard to obtain, I also do not think them necessary to understand this community. Instead, one must follow (or even engage) in the practice: "A culture is expressed (or constituted) only by the actions and words of its members and must be interpreted by, not given to, a field worker" (Van Maanen 1988).
]]
Different research approaches draw from different epistemological assumptions that may render their methodologies difficult to understand for people from outside the "camp." Clearly, Joseph and I are both strongly influenced by anthropological approaches; however, I also think that pluralism can be a strength within a research community, so I would not encourage those who enjoy survey research to abandon it. Instead, try to understand the strengths and limitations of this particular instrument in contributing to a wider research agenda that hopefully includes a wider repertoire of methods. :-)
For example, ethnomethodology suggests that individual's accounts of their own behavior are socially situated... so any interviewee is obviously engaged in a process of accounting for their behavior in an "artificial" context, that is: making it intelligible to the interviewer. But that doesn't mean that I discount interview data. On the contrary, I depend on it heavily in my work because it also provides me with important information. I try very hard to understand the limitations of the method, so I am not blind to interviewees efforts to "give me what I want" and I generally use interviewing as one part of a larger research strategy that also includes participant and non-participant observation.
andrea
On 11/30/06, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
On Thursday 30 November 2006 07:51, Andrea Forte wrote:
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in.
This issue and the sheer size of WP prompted me to consider looking at smaller communities on the WP. However, my efforts weren't terribly productive.
[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/ethno/leadership.html
In this time I also sought out and considered "small neighborhoods" of articles and collaborators, eventually settling upon the corpus of Harry Potter pages given the project's coherence, liveliness and my own, earlier, experience of advocating for a reform in how readers should be warned of the possibility of spoilers (i.e., having a plot of a new book spoiled when consulting a Harry Potter article).
On a suggestion, I developed a brief questionnaire to engage with editors of the Harry Potter Project pages but, as expected, received few responses. Open content communities are, presently, often studied (with similar questionnaires) and participants might have little interest in taking time away from their actual (volunteer) work to respond to yet another. (As a participant, I have never responded to such a questionnaire.) Contacting actual participants can be difficult as well, as Lorenzon (2005) noted: "Many editors have their own user page which give information about them but few give out their real names and contact information." I made my solicitation on the Talk page for the Project as well as the Talk pages of a handful of prominent editors, without much success. Additionally, because most all the discourse is public and the community is otherwise so reflective, there is an abundance of existing data situated in actual practice. This is not to say such research discussions are not useful; once I developed my questions I was interested in receiving answers and the single response was informative. Fortunately, while responses to questionnaires can be hard to obtain, I also do not think them necessary to understand this community. Instead, one must follow (or even engage) in the practice: "A culture is expressed (or constituted) only by the actions and words of its members and must be interpreted by, not given to, a field worker" (Van Maanen 1988).
]] _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Thursday 30 November 2006 09:09, Andrea Forte wrote:
understand for people from outside the "camp." Clearly, Joseph and I are both strongly influenced by anthropological approaches; however, I also think that pluralism can be a strength within a research community, so I would not encourage those who enjoy survey research to abandon it.
Just to be clear, neither would I! I have participated in survey research in the past, aware of its limitations [1], and would like to see a good job done up in the Wikipedia case. However, it is a very hard problem and (fortunately?) not central to my present project. But the question remains, how do we move beyond the many small self-selecting surveys bouncing around towards something more robust? In my e-mail, I was pointing out that perhaps getting a representative sample of all of Wikipedia is an impossible goal, and perhaps we can focus on specific "local" communities. But maybe not! It'd be great to have something on the scale of Ghosh et al. (2002) on FLOSS which had 2784 (self-selected) respondents, a portion of which (487) validated/confirmed [2].
[1] http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/06/search.cgi?query=Cranor%2C_Reagle_and_Acker... [2] http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/FLOSS-Final4a.htm
Based on the current discussion we're talking about at least two things here,
(1) The public perception on the 'editability' of Wikipedia
Regarding that I agree with Joseph that there are quite a few number of people whom never noticed that WP can be edited, not limiting to undergraduate students, but even some professors. I found this (heuristically) particularly pronounced among the less internet-savvy group. This leads to the second issue,
(2) A public perception survey
Agree with Andrea, it is currently quite impossible to do a representative research on WP. Hence it would be more worthwhile to perform target-group research. However, as we previously discussed in Frankfurt as well in Boston, we might somehow need to consider a centralized pool of research resources. Like what Joseph said, it is very hard to get users to respond to ad hoc research questionnaires - a lot of people just dismiss the yet another questionnaire on Wikipedia. If we ever pull together enough effort to start on some more structured and apparently (/cough cough) reputable research, and perhaps leave the research data available to researchers by request, it may significantly increase the quality of research on WP. Of course, the issue of privacy is touchy...
/headache
Andrea Forte wrote:
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in. If I were reviewing a paper, I would be quite skeptical of claims about "Wikipedia readers" because how people understand information, the Internet, and collaborative technologies is culturally constructed.
It seems more relevant anyhow to be able to say, for example, we think this is how middle-class secondary school students in the US and England are thinking about Wikipedia. Or this is how professional journalists in Germany are thinking about Wikipedia. More targeted sampling provides purchase for interpreting the results in a culturally relevant fashion.
Andrea
On 11/30/06, Joachim Schroer joachim.schroer@googlemail.com wrote:
Dear all,
2006/11/30, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com:
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
we included a number of these and related questions in our current (German) survey of Wikipedia readers/visitors [1, 2], although we do not ask about other encyclopedias. The survey is available here (thanks to Jakob Voss!):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Leserumfrage
I'm afraid, however, that our own resources in recruiting a representative sample of readers are somewhat limited. Any help is greatly appreciated... ;-)
Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
Joachim
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/123/ [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.deutsch/17765/
-- Joachim Schroer, Dipl.-Psych. University of Wuerzburg Department of Psychology II, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Roentgenring 10 97070 Wuerzburg Germany
Phone: +49 931 31 6062 Fax: +49 931 31 6063 http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/staff/schroer.php schroer@psychologie.uni-wuerzurg.de _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Wednesday 29 November 2006 19:44, Josef Kolbitsch wrote:
"Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that). I have
Not commenting on the questionnaire, but I did want to point out that if many people don't know the basics about WP, perhaps more should be done in the header of the main body of articles to introduce them to this user editable encyclopedia.
How about going back to the good old big fat Edit button that used to be on the original C2 wiki implementation? And how about putting that button both at the top and and the bottom of the pages, and in the case of WP, beside each section header?
If the ability to edit a page is so central to a wiki, then maybe the button or link you click on to edit should be given more screen real estate.
Alain
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Joseph Reagle Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 9:11 AM To: wiki-research-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] How many know that WP is editable anddiscussable?
On Wednesday 29 November 2006 19:44, Josef Kolbitsch wrote:
"Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that). I have
Not commenting on the questionnaire, but I did want to point out that if many people don't know the basics about WP, perhaps more should be done in the header of the main body of articles to introduce them to this user editable encyclopedia. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Granted, a frequent complaint among readers is how "cluttered" the articles look with wikilinks. Add in extra confusing things, and casual readers may get freaked out and leave.
Personally, I don't think changing the visual look of Wikipedia will help any.
Nick
On 12/13/06, Desilets, Alain Alain.Desilets@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca wrote:
How about going back to the good old big fat Edit button that used to be on the original C2 wiki implementation? And how about putting that button both at the top and and the bottom of the pages, and in the case of WP, beside each section header?
If the ability to edit a page is so central to a wiki, then maybe the button or link you click on to edit should be given more screen real estate.
Alain
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