I read it several times before figuring out (maybe?) that this is a request that update the list of questions at [[WP:WD]]. That page looks rather...well, "outdated" is an understatement...
However, it would seem to me that a researcher would generate questions to research by looking at the discussion sections of recent papers on the topic of Wikipedia. Usually in the discussion section, the author mentions something like "more research needs to be done on /x/ /topic/."
God bless, Bob
On 3/14/2011 11:28 PM, Elias Friedman wrote:
Sad to say, I only read about a quarter of it before I gave up too.
Sent from my Droid2 Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי elipongo@gmail.com On Mar 15, 2011 12:25 AM, "I Love Plankton"iloveplankton@gmail.com wrote:
TL;DR wall of text amirite?
On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Chitu Okoli<Chitu.Okoli@concordia.ca wrote:
[Apologies for cross-posting; this same e-mail is being sent to wikipedia-l, WikiEN-l and foundation-l]
Hi everyone,
We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages,
we
unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about
Wikipedia
only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do
include
studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are published in English.) We have completed a search using many major
databases
of scholarly research. We've posted separate messages to wiki-research-l related to this literature review.
We have identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have
"wikipedia",
"wikipedian", or "wikipedians" in their title, abstract or keywords. As
this
number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses; we identified 638 such studies. In addition, we
identified
around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles.
We hope that our review would provide useful insights for both
wikipedians
and researchers. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are
also
wikipedians, we define wikipedian or "Wikipedia practitioner" here as someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly researcher.) In particular, here is a list of some of the research
questions
we are investigating in our review that are particularly pertinent to wikipedians (you can check wiki-research-l for the full set of research questions):
- What high-quality research has been conducted with Wikipedia as a
major
topic or data source? As mentioned in the introductory e-mail, we have already identified over 2,100 studies, though we will only analyze 638 of them in depth. We will group the articles by field of study.
- What research questions have been asked by various sources, both
academic scholarly and practitioner? We want to know both the subjects
that
the existing research has covered, and also catalogue key questions that practitioners would like to be answered, whether or not academic research has broached these questions. Also, we categorize the research questions based on their purposes.
- What conclusions have been made from existing research? That is, what
questions from RQ2 have been answered, and what are these answers?
- What questions from RQ2 are left unanswered? (These present directions
for future research.)
Regarding our RQ2, on the research questions that have been asked, we
want
to identify not only the research questions that we extract from the articles, but also what questions are of interest that have not been studied. For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related research questions.
We are most of all interested in questions that wikipedians are asking, other than what researchers are asking. There is an old list of research questions or goals at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals; these questions are about Wikimedia Foundation projects in general, though Wikipedia is of course included. Could you please review this list and update that page directly with any additional questions? Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could update the list.
Another bank of questions we have identified is more directed towards academics and researchers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Questi... .
We have asked the wiki-research-l subscribers to update that list. We
will
draw from both lists for our bank of research questions.
Thanks for your help.
Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (
http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content....
) Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l