Hi everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, March 20, at
9:30 AM PST / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1710952200>. In line with Women's History
Month, the theme for this showcase is *Addressing Knowledge Gaps*.
You are welcome to watch via the YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6wrr9WShTk. As usual, you can join the
conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live.
This month's presentation:
Leveraging Recommender Systems to Reduce Content Gaps on WikipediaBy *Mo
Houtti*Many Wikipedians use algorithmic recommender systems to help them
find interesting articles to edit. The algorithms underlying those systems
are driven by a straightforward assumption: we can look at what someone
edited in the past to figure out what they’ll most likely want to edit
next. But the story of what Wikipedians want to edit is almost definitely
more complex than that. For example, our own prior research shows that
Wikipedians prefer prioritizing articles that would minimize content gaps.
So, we asked, what would happen if we incorporated that value into
Wikipedians’ personalized recommendations? Through a controlled experiment
on SuggestBot, we found that recommending more content gap articles didn’t
significantly impact editing, despite those articles being less “optimally
interesting” according to the recommendation algorithm. In this
presentation, I will describe our experiment, our results, and their
implications - including how recommender systems can be one useful strategy
for tackling content gaps on Wikipedia.Bridging the offline and online-
Offline meetings of WikipediansBy *Nicole Schwitter*Wikipedia is primarily
known as an online encyclopaedia, but it also features a noteworthy offline
component: Wikipedia and particularly its German-language edition – which
is one of the largest and most active language versions – is characterised
by regular local offline meetups which give editors the chance to get to
know each other. This talk will present the recently published dewiki
meetup dataset which covers (almost) all offline gatherings organised on
the German-language version of Wikipedia. The dataset covers almost 20
years of offline activity of the German-language Wikipedia, containing 4418
meetups that have been organised with information on attendees, apologies,
date and place of meeting, and minutes recorded. The talk will explain how
the dataset can be used for research, highlight the importance of
considering offline meetings among Wikipedians, and place these insights
within the context of addressing gender gaps within Wikipedia.
Best,
Kinneret
--
Kinneret Gordon
Lead Research Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>