Hi Everyone,
The next Wikimedia Research Showcase will be live-streamed Wednesday,
September 19 2018 at 11:30 AM (PDT) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY8vZ6wES9o
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#Upcoming_Showcase>
Hope to see you there!
This month's presentations is:
The impact of news exposure on collective attention in the United States
during the 2016 Zika epidemicBy *Michele Tizzoni, André Panisson, Daniela
Paolotti, Ciro Cattuto*In recent years, many studies have drawn attention
to the important role of collective awareness and human behaviour during
epidemic outbreaks. A number of modelling efforts have investigated the
interaction between the disease transmission dynamics and human behaviour
change mediated by news coverage and by information spreading in the
population. Yet, given the scarcity of data on public awareness during an
epidemic, few studies have relied on empirical data. Here, we use
fine-grained, geo-referenced data from three online sources - Wikipedia,
the GDELT Project and the Internet Archive - to quantify population-scale
information seeking about the 2016 Zika virus epidemic in the U.S.,
explicitly linking such behavioural signal to epidemiological data.
Geo-localized Wikipedia pageview data reveal that visiting patterns of
Zika-related pages in Wikipedia were highly synchronized across the United
States and largely explained by exposure to national television broadcast.
Contrary to the assumption of some theoretical models, news volume and
Wikipedia visiting patterns were not significantly correlated with the
magnitude or the extent of the epidemic. Attention to Zika, in terms of
Zika-related Wikipedia pageviews, was high at the beginning of the
outbreak, when public health agencies raised an international alert and
triggered media coverage, but subsequently exhibited an activity profile
that suggests nonlinear dependencies and memory effects in the relationship
between information seeking, media pressure, and disease dynamics. This
calls for a new and more general modelling framework to describe the
interaction between media exposure, public awareness, and disease dynamics
during epidemic outbreaks.
Deliberation and resolution on WikipediaA case study of requests for
commentsBy *Amy Zhang, Jane Im*Resolving disputes in a timely manner is
crucial for any online production group. We present an analysis of Requests
for Comments (RfCs), one of the main vehicles on Wikipedia for formally
resolving a policy or content dispute. We collected an exhaustive dataset
of 7,316 RfCs on English Wikipedia over the course of 7 years and conducted
a qualitative and quantitative analysis into what issues affect the RfC
process. Our analysis was informed by 10 interviews with frequent RfC
closers. We found that a major issue affecting the RfC process is the
prevalence of RfCs that could have benefited from formal closure but that
linger indefinitely without one, with factors including participants'
interest and expertise impacting the likelihood of resolution. From these
findings, we developed a model that predicts whether
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy>
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org