[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Pavlo Shevelo]

Hello Gerard,

Regarding you main point call for research I have nothing to say but
Hear! Hear!! HEAR!!! ;)

Some small example (casestudy): recently I <s>requested</s> asked for
as much statistics data about WMF board elections as possible just
because I'm eager to make series  of researches and possibly make them
regular if not neverending - like 24*7 dashboards or something like
that.

There is one thing which might be either sorta objection to what
you've wrote (to one aspect of that) or proposal for research agenda:
Are all Wikipedias really separate projects or all of them are
segments of one single international project? Certainly 'single
project' model provides very different level of different segments
autonomy  and some (many? most?) of them are loosely coupled yet (?or
forever?).
Let me mention Siebrand in this context as well (as you did): who is
Siebrand and his SieBot for, say, Ukrainian Wikipedia?
Should we say (shout? :) ) something like "Siebrand, go home and take
your bot with you! We have *our* bots and it's Ukrainian-made bots who
has a right to process Ukrainian Wikipedia"? ;-P
... or just the opposite - interwiki maintaining (beginning from deep
interwiki research by the way) is concern of integral pan-Wikipedia
community so the only choice is teamwork with  Siebrand?

Sincerely,

Pavlo Shevelo

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Gerard
Meijssen<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> For me while interesting, it is hardly new and therefore not that
> interesting what people like Ed H Chi write about Wikipedia. They do not
> write about Wikipedia, they write about the English language Wikipedia.
> Invariably news written about Wikipedia concentrates on just one of over 260
> projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about and it ignores important
> things that are happening.
>
> I would be interested in more study looking at the "other" wikipedias. This
> is where all kinds of other phenomena exist.
>
> Yesterday Siebrand observed that there is a group of languages that have
> solid localisations and, the current localisation rally makes this group
> stand out even more.  We have the impression that this coincides with the
> vitality of projects; German French Dutch are top performers in localisation
> they have a healthy community and provide a great Wikipedia. For languages
> like Spanish Turkish Swedish Italian it is still possible for people to take
> part in the translatewiki.net localisation rally. People who participate on
> languages like Estonian and Khmer find that they have to concentrate on
> doing the most used and MediaWiki core messages first (our rationale being
> that our Wikipedia readers are best served in this way.
>
> With a sample size fof 260, it becomes possible to do research into the
> effect of localisation and the performance of a project. As
> LocalisationUpdate is being tested for use in the WMF, timely delivery of
> localisations becomes a reality once it is implemented. This will give the
> numbers of localisation and performance a much more direct relation with
> each other... The question is, if someone is interested in the numbers
> provided by such research..
>
> It is known for languages like Bangla that Wikipedia is the biggest resource
> in that language in that language, I can imagine that this is true for other
> languages as well. When a Wikipedia has such a status, it changes the
> relevance of that Wikipedia for scientists who study thea language. It is
> interesting to learn what the effects are on the people who use the internet
> in these languages. With Wikipedia being the biggest resource does this
> populate the Google search results and, does this make the Internet more of
> a worthwhile experience?
>
> We know that things like sources, NPOV, BLP are particularly relevant on our
> biggest projects. On our smaller projects these things do not get the same
> attention. Here it is more important to have articles in the first place.
> The make-up of these communities is likely to be utterly different as well.
> Would it not be nice to understand how our projects are populated and study
> how it evolves over time? At what stage all kinds of policies start to kick
> in?
>
> Research, the numbers they provide are important on many levels. They
> indicate issues, they indicate where we want to put our resources. The lack
> of research on the other Wikipedias make the other Wikipedias invisible,
> issues particular to other languages do not get attention and consequently
> resources needed to address issues are not available.
>
> My argument is that there is a lack of research on Wikipedia, Wikipedia as a
> whole would benefit from research and indeed where the English Wikipedia's
> growth is slowing down, there is plenty of room for growth elsewhere of
> standard encyclopaedic information in the other projects. This in turn will
> bring up many subjects that en.wp does not cover. The existence of articles
> on subjects not covered in en.wp are indicative of a bias and once en.wp
> starts to cover these subjects it will improve its neutral point of view..
> Consequently ALL our Wikipedias including en.wp will benefit from research
> on the "other" Wikipedias.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
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