Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday,
December 21, 2016 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 (UTC).
YouTube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmrlu5qTgyA
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#December_2016>.
The December 2016 Research Showcase includes:
English Wikipedia Quality Dynamics and the Case of WikiProject Women
ScientistsBy *Aaron Halfaker
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Halfak_(WMF)>*With every productive
edit, Wikipedia is steadily progressing towards higher and higher quality.
In order to track quality improvements, Wikipedians have developed an
article quality assessment rating scale that ranges from "Stub" at the
bottom to "Featured Articles" at the top. While this quality scale has the
promise of giving us insights into the dynamics of quality improvements in
Wikipedia, it is hard to use due to the sporadic nature of manual
re-assessments. By developing a highly accurate prediction model (based on
work by Warncke-Wang et al.), we've developed a method to assess an
articles quality at any point in history. Using this model, we explore
general trends in quality in Wikipedia and compare these trends to those of
an interesting cross-section: Articles tagged by WikiProject Women
Scientists. Results suggest that articles about women scientists were lower
quality than the rest of the wiki until mid-2013, after which a dramatic
shift occurred towards higher quality. This shift may correlate with (and
even be caused by) this WikiProjects initiatives.
Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration. A Study of
Tor Users and WikipediansBy *Andrea Forte*In a recent qualitative study to
be published at CSCW 2017, collaborators Rachel Greenstadt, Naz Andalibi,
and I examined privacy practices and concerns among contributors to open
collaboration projects. We collected interview data from people who use the
anonymity network Tor who also contribute to online projects and from
Wikipedia editors who are concerned about their privacy to better
understand how privacy concerns impact participation in open collaboration
projects. We found that risks perceived by contributors to open
collaboration projects include threats of surveillance, violence,
harassment, opportunity loss, reputation loss, and fear for loved ones. We
explain participants’ operational and technical strategies for mitigating
these risks and how these strategies affect their contributions. Finally,
we discuss chilling effects associated with privacy loss, the need for open
collaboration projects to go beyond attracting and educating participants
to consider their privacy, and some of the social and technical approaches
that could be explored to mitigate risk at a project or community level.
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org