new paper - WikimediaZA

22 Apr 2018

I wanted to share a paper [1] (abstract below) that I co-wrote with others
which is a small part of the really interesting project that some of the
folks on this list were involved with (the Wikipedia Primary School Project
[2]) in SA. Will hopefully be talking about this (and other Wikipedia work)
at Wikimania this year. Would love to hear any feedback you might have.

Best,
Heather.

[1] author's preprint here https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qn5xd and
published version here
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444818760870

[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Primary_School_SSAJRP_pr…

Dr Heather Ford
Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Media <https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/>,
University of New South Wales
w: hblog.org / EthnographyMatters.net <http://ethnographymatters.net/> / t:
@hfordsa <http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa>
Beyond notification: Filling gaps in peer production projects

In order to counter systemic bias in peer production projects like
Wikipedia, a variety of strategies have been used to fill gaps and improve
the completeness of the archive. We test a number of these strategies in a
project aimed at improving articles relating to South Africa’s primary
school curriculum and find that many of the predominant strategies are
insufficient for filling Wikipedia’s gaps. Notifications that alert users
to the existence of gaps including incomplete or missing articles, in
particular, are found to be ineffective at improving articles. Only through
the process of trust-building and the development of negotiated boundary
objects, potential allies (institutional academics in this case) can be
enrolled in the task of editing the encyclopaedia. Rather than a simple
process of enrolment via notification, this project demonstrated the
principles of negotiation required for engaging with new editor groups in
the long-term project of filling Wikipedia’s gaps.