Wikipedia bot wars capture the imagination of the popular press – but are they real?; personality and attitudes to Wikipedia; large expert review experiment
This month's edition focuses on research about the role of Wikipedia in education, with reviews of recently published articles covering various angles of the topic.
Reader demand for some topics (e.g. LGBT topics or pages about countries) is poorly satisfied, whereas there is over-abundance of quality on topics of comparatively little interest, such as military history.
The authors attempt to answer the question "Who are the most important people of all times?" Their findings clearly show that different Wikipedias give different prominence to different individuals.
A paper titled "Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education" uses the technology acceptance model to shed light on faculty's (of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) views of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.
In new research conducted in light of proposed changes to data protection legislation in the European Union (EU), authors Bart Custers, Simone van der Hof, and Bart Schermer conducted a comparative analysis of social media and user-generated content websites’ privacy policies along with a user survey (N=8,621 in 26 countries) and interviews in 13 different EU countries on awareness, values, and attitudes toward privacy online.
0.75% of Wikipedia birthdates are inaccurate, reported Robert Viseur at WikiSym 2014. Those inaccuracies are "low, although higher than the 0.21% observed for the baseline reference sources". Given that biographies represent 15% of English Wikipedia, the third largest category after "arts" and "culture", their accuracy is important.
Shifting values in the paid content debate: Kim Osman has performed a fascinating study on the three 2013 failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, Osman analyzed 573 posts from the three main votes on paid editing conducted in the community in November 2013.
Power users and diversity in WikiProjects: In a recent paper, Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash investigate the question of sustainability in online communities by analysing trends in the growth of WikiProjects.
Predicting which article you will edit next: Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders; "Chinese-language time zones" favor Asian pop and IT topics on Wikipedia; and bipartite editing prediction in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google: Can you predict the number of seasonal influenza-like illness in the U.S. using data from Wikipedia?
Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates: Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia" doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about the Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.
CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism: The monthly roundup of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee.
An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.
Analyzing edits to the-then 46 largest Wikipedias between July 9 and August 8, 2013, a study identified a set of about 8,000 contributors with a global user account who have edited more than one of these language versions in that time frame.
Wikipedia works on the efforts of unpaid volunteers who choose to donate their time to advance the cause of free knowledge. This phenomenon, as trivial as it may sound to those acquainted with Wikipedia inner workings, has always puzzled economists and social scientists alike, in that standard Economic theory would not predict that such enterprises would thrive without any form of remuneration.
User influence on site policies: Wikipedia vs. Facebook vs. Youtube: Laura Stein, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has concluded that, based on her comparison of user policy documents (including the Terms of Service) of YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers the highest level of participation power overall.
A conference paper makes a rather serious claim: "We find a surprisingly large number of editors who change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status."
An ArXiv preprint titled "Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles" is about the Wikipedia articles on individuals and their position in the hyperlink network of the articles in each Wikipedia language edition, considering the whole hyperlink network.
Sentiment monitoring; UNESCO and systemic bias; and more: A report on an online service which was created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies, and more.
A paper presented at last month's CSCW Conference observes that "Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order", yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization.
Wikipedia not so novel after all, except to UK university lecturers: "Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past.
The gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in its immediate aftermath, and a look back at Wikipedians' participation in the January protests against SOPA and PIPA.
An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
A paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, coming from the social control perspective and employing the repertory grid technique, has contributed interesting observations about the governance of Wikipedia.
A paper to appear in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist describes how "several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have led to a more restrictive environment for newcomers" and points to three factors contributing to the increasingly "restrictive environment" they face.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee and republished as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
