Patriotic editing hypothesis - Wiki-research-l

24 Jan 2017

Regarding Kerry Raymond's "Patriotic editing hypothesis", I've done
some very simple informal investigation regarding the quality of
geographic articles, these are mostly on cities, towns, counties, etc.
in en:Wikipedia.  Geographic articles have much lower average quality
scores than other subjects (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Smallbones/Quality4by4 )
With just a small bit of poking around it's obvious that the quality
difference between geo articles and the rest is due to geo articles
about countries where English is not the native language. A bit more
poking and something that should have been really obvious jumps out.
French geo articles on FR:Wiki are much better (at least longer) than
the corresponding EN:Wiki article; Russian geo articles are much
better on RU:Wiki than on EN:Wiki, etc.

This is certainly consistent with the "Patriotic editing hypothesis"
if we define patriotism by language rather than by borders.  It could
be checked out with other language versions e.g. German vs. French;
(Finnish, Estonian, Polish, German, or Hungarian, etc.) vs.Russian;
Chinese vs. any language.

The hypothesis even had a very practical implication - we should
translate more geo articles from their native language Wikipedias.

Hope this helps,
Pete Ekman
====
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 11:12:58 +1000
From: "Kerry Raymond" &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com&gt;
To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
        &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] regional KPIs
Message-ID: &lt;006701d275df$02016b90$060442b0$(a)gmail.com&gt;
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

As previously came up in discussion about chapters, it would be very useful
to have national data about Wikipedia activities, which can be determined
(generally) from IP addresses. Now I understand the privacy argument in
relation to logged-in users (not saying I agree with it though in relation
to aggregate data). However, can we find a proxy that does not have the
privacy considerations.

My hypothesis is that national content is predominantly written by users
resident in that nation. And that therefore activity on national content can
be used as a proxy for national user editing activity.

In the case of Australia, we could describe Australian national content in
either of two ways: articles within the closure of the
[[Category:Australia]] and/or those tagged as  {{WikiProject Australia}}.
There are arguments for/against either (neither is perfect, in my experience
the category closure will tend to have false positives and the project will
tend to have false negatives).

I would like to know what correlation exists between national editor
activity (as determined from IP addresses mapped to location) and national
content edits and if/how it changes over time for various nations. This is
research that only WMF can do because WMF has the IP addresses and the rest
of us can't have them for privacy reasons.

If we could establish that a strong-enough correlation existed between them,
we could use national content activity (for which there is no privacy
consideration) as a proxy for national editing activity. And we might even
be able to come up with a multiplier for each nation to provide comparable
data for national editing activity.

Now, it may be that we need to restrict the edits themselves in some way to
maximise the correlations between national content and same-nation editor
activity.

My second hypothesis is "semantic" edits (e.g. edits that add large amounts
of content or citation) to national content will be more highly correlated
with same-nation editors than "syntactic" edits (e.g. fix spelling,
punctuation or Manual of Style issues) will be. I suspect most bots and
other automated/semi-automated edits are doing syntactic edits.

Now, some of you will probably be aware of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-01-17/Recen
t_research Female Wikipedians aren't more likely to edit women biographies].
So it may well be that my patriotic-editing hypothesis is also untrue. But
it would be nice to know one way or the other.

Kerry