[Foundation-l] Research assistance

James Heilman jmh649 at gmail.com
Sat Jan 21 13:42:31 UTC 2012


I am applying for a summer student to do a Wikipedia Medicine research
project through my department at UBC. One potentially project I am looking
it is having them review all the edits made to Wikiproject Medicine
articles. The student will go through each edit and a) determine if the
edit is okay and revert it/fix it if it is not b) determine which edits are
made from IP/new users verses long term edits c) calculate the percentage
of positive/negative edits from each group d) they will be going over edits
from more than one day old thus we will be able to determine how good
Wikipedia is at repairing itself. I am thinking of collecting a weeks worth
of edits.

While we have a list here
http://toolserver.org/~tim1357/cgi-bin/wikiproject_watchlist.py?template=WikiProject%20Medicine&order=desc&limit=200&t=0&m=1&b=0&user=&off=0&cat=0&hip=0&q=1
if multiple edits
are made to the same page in a single day it only shows the last one. Is it
possible to get a list of all edits? If should be possible to work with
this list if another is not available.

If I am able to get approval and funding from UBC I am hoping to run a
second round collecting the same data but with "pending changes" turned on
for a week on all medical articles. This students would be required to
handing all pending changes to all medical articles and will be collecting
the same data as before. This will allow us to determine 1) if pending
changes affects the numbers of IPs editing 2) if and to what degree pending
changes reduces the visibility of poor quality content. The proposed
student will be either between first and second year or second and third
year medicine and will be working 40 hours per week for 6-8 weeks during
the summer. If of course the last part of the project does not get approval
I will still try to go ahead with the first part and will have the student
join me on the "Medical Translation Project" as discussed here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:MED/Translation_project

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian



More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list