Hi all,
Update time.
Given that this is a long email: there is an action item in the 5th bullet point below for the language communities who want to participate in the next iteration of the study. If you are interested to have your language included in the study, we need a response by 2019-02-15. See below for more.
* The paper on Why the World Reads Wikipedia is accepted in WSDM '19 [1]. If you are planning to attend the conference, stop by to hear Florian Lemmerich presenting the work. You can read the paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474 . If you have time to only read one subsection of the paper, we would recommend section 4.4. Summary of Results. From there, you can start reading the other parts of the paper depending on your interest about introduction, methodology and data, etc. If you prefer to watch a presentation about the paper, you can check out the December 2018 Research showcase [2].
* Remember that our offer to provide presentations and discuss the result with your language community, if your language is part of the 14 languages in the study [3], is still on the table. :) If you want to talk with us about this topic, sign up at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reade... . No pressure from us: only if having a conversation about readers help your language community in what you do.
* We have put extensive effort to document the code [4] and data [5] for this research such that each language community can dive in their data as they see fit.
* What's next? The previous results made one point clear to us: geography and language matter and depending on from where in the world the reader is accessing a specific Wikipedia language, they may have different needs and motivations [6]. We hypothesize that age, gender, education, native language, as well as geographic region the reader is from can help us understand and characterize the needs and motivations of Wikipedia readers better. As some of you may already be guessing: there are some big questions ahead of us. For example, are there disparities in access to content depending on the readers' age or gender? Does the trajectory of readers differ depending on their demographics? We'd like to start addressing questions along these lines and better understand the needs and motivations of sub-populations within a country or language community.
To do the above, we will rerun the study and this time we will include some demographics questions as part of the study.
* How can your language community participate in the upcoming study of reader demographics? As always, research on this front is not possible without a very close collaboration between the language communities who will participate in this study and the researchers. If you want your language to be included in this round of the study, please sign up at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reade... on or before 2019-02-15 .
Please note that the priority will be given to the 14 languages that participated in the previous round and that we will do our best to include new languages. Also note that we may not be able to run the study in all the languages that sign up: the traffic to the language edition, the diversity that the inclusion of the language can bring to the language pool, our capacity to run the analysis in the language, the availability of the point of contact from the language for translations will all play a role in the final list of languages that we can include in the study. This being said, please don't shy away from listing your language there if you're interested. :)
Best, Leila, on behalf of the researchers (Isaac Johnson, Florian Lemmerich, Diego Saez, Markus Strohmaier, Bob West, and myself)
[1] http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2019/ [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018 [3] ar, bn, de, en, es, he, hi, hu, ja, nl, ro, ru, uk, zh [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... [6] The needs and motivations themselves don't change, but the distribution over possible options can change, as well as the reader characteristics that can describe them. [7] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh...
On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 5:43 PM Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
Update time.
Thank you all for your patience and support as we went through the different stages of the analysis for this study. We have now concluded the study based on the survey of the 14 Wikipedia languages [1]. Here is what will happen next:
- We are doing some relatively major documentation at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... . The goal is to have that page and the sub-pages in a way that can be consumed more easily by audiences beyond researchers. I expect the pages to come to life almost completely on or before 2018-09-14. We will need the first couple of weeks of October for data and code documentation to make sure you have all the data you need for your languages to dig deeper if you choose to. By the end of October, please expect all documentation to be completed.
- We are happy to try to give presentations about this research to
your language community if there is interest on your end and we can make it work on our end. The priority will be given to languages that already participated in the study. If you want to sign up for one, please go to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh...
- Our November Research Showcase [2] will most likely be on this
topic, so if you want to have a general overview of the results, keep an eye on that.
- We have submitted a research paper to a peer-reviewed conference
based on this work. There is an anonymization process for the reviews and in order to not break that we will wait until the results are out (towards the end of October) and only then put the full paper on arxiv, under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a more permissive license.
- We are discussing with our collaborators to potentially set up a
challenge for researchers to work with a subset of the data (anonymized/aggregated/...) to answer an interesting research questions. If you want to brainstorm with us about this, please drop a line at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reade...
- Do you have an idea about how to more effectively disseminate this
knowledge? please call it out. There is quite a bit of knowledge to share and we're honestly not 100% sure what the best way to do it is across a global movement. As a result, we're offering a mix of documentation, pinging points of contacts in each language so they're aware of them, general presentations, language specific presentations, as well as data documentation for you to be able to dig on your own deeper.
Best, Leila, on behalf of the researchers (Florian Lemmerich, Diego Saez, Bob West, and myself)
[1] ar, bn, de, en, es, he, hi, hu, ja, nl, ro, ru, uk, zh [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase