The world where dreams come true

This week, the Signpost visited the land of Disney, blockbusters, explosions, dream sequences, and cultural masterpieces: film. WikiProject Film was first created in September 2003, though the project's homepage wasn't filled out until the following year. With around 500 members, it is one of the largest wikiprojects on the site. It boasts over 225 pieces of featured content, 626 good articles, and still has three A-class articles from a long-shuttered review process. We talked with Erik, Favre1fan93, Corvoe, NinjaRobotPirate, and Lugnuts.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Film? Who is your favorite director?

• Erik: I joined WikiProject Film because as a moviegoer, I like to follow movie news, especially for upcoming releases. When I made small edits around the winter of 2005-06, I realized how easy it was to edit, and I learned to contribute details about films to their articles. I also found films to be an uncontroversial set of topics that was fairly easy to research.
• Favre1fan93: I believe WikiProject Film was one of the first WikiProjects I joined on Wikipedia. I tended to gravitate towards the media areas of the encyclopedia (films, television, video games and comics) so once I started edited and began to understand it better, I began to gravitate to certain articles under the project that I thought I could contribute to.
• Corvoe: I joined the project close to a year ago, and it's the first one I've dived in to. Though I'd worked on music articles for a considerable amount of time beforehand, I've never felt more at home than at WikiProject Film. Its collaborations far outweight its solo ventures, and there are a large amount of us just wanting to improve as many articles as much as we can. As a film lover, I recreationally look up large amounts of information regarding films, and I'm a sucker for featurettes and commentaries, so I have the information in my head already. I want others like me to have any amount of information that we can find at their fingertips, so that those as curious as I am have one centralized hub for any films they might be interested in. Favourite director: David Fincher.
• NinjaRobotPirate: I joined a little over year ago. I had already been casually editing film-related articles off-and-on for several years, so it seemed like a good idea. I was primarily drawn by the wealth of information: a list of reliable sources, detailed manual of style and notability pages, a lively talk page, and many help pages. I feel very comfortable editing film-related articles now, and my time spent in WikiProject Film has given me the experience and confidence to create my own articles.
• Lugnuts: I joined in 2006 after working to populate the category Category:Black-and-white films. I saw the category from the article for Eraserhead and noticed it only had a handful of articles within it. I was shocked at the time that there wasn't much coverage on silent films, so I started to work on them starting with Charlie Chaplin's filmography. My favourite directors are David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, amongst others.

It has been five years since our last interview with WikiProject Film. Has the project seen many changes in that time? Has the project reached any significant milestones? What challenges does the project face today that weren't on the radar in 2009?

• Erik: I think the biggest change to WikiProject Film is that we no longer have coordinators. At the time, we wanted to emulate WikiProject Military history in how it organized itself, but we were not able to collaborate that formally. My feeling is that many editors like to work on their own topics of interest and to have their own schedules to follow. However, I think WikiProject Film's talk page is one of Wikipedia's most active. It is a good place to ask for input. As for challenges, I do not think we have any major ones. The Manual of Style for film is occasionally revised to help resolve disputes. I would say a perennial challenge is how to identify the key countries related to a film. There are more and more multinational collaborations, and it can be difficult to ping down the degree of countries' involvement. Even reliable sources can differ.
• Lugnuts: I think we agree a consensus quicker than other projects on Wikipedia and update the relevant manual of style to reflect that. More challenges from 2009 include editors adding in copyright material, esp. plots, into articles and spotting them quicker.

Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? Are article promotions becoming easier or more difficult to accomplish? What unique challenges does the project face in getting its articles to FA or GA status?

• Erik: I wrote the Featured Article Fight Club and contributed a bit to American Beauty and Changeling. I have also written a few Good Articles, both on my own and in collaboration. However, I have not actively pursued promotions for a few years. The GA nominations were pretty frequently backlogged, and I fell out the habit of striving for GA promotions. As for FA promotions, I think it takes a lot of work to truly research a film. Older Featured Articles about films were usually based on online sources and did not often incorporate books as references. It's a challenge to go that above and beyond since resources can be hard to access and since we have only so much time to devote to what is essentially a hobby for most of us. Aside from that, I would say that a challenge in getting more promotions is that we do not review each other enough. I think it's easy to contribute incrementally, but it's hard to review others' articles in the same manner, especially if it is very detailed.
• Favre1fan93: I have contributed to multiple featured content. My main area of work for the WikiProject is working on all of the articles related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Myself and a few other editors really started to make a strong push once I started becoming a main contributor, continuing some of their work from before I started. Since I've joined the project, I've contributed to Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World and the main Marvel Cinematic Universe pages to becoming Good Articles. In addition, we are preparing to get Captain America: The Winter Soldier to become a GA probably in the next month or two, in further advancement of attempting to make the film articles of the MCU a Good Topic. Some challenges that the project faces is that, in reality, all of the articles can not get to Featured or Good status. In my opinion, it takes a good amount of teamwork to get an article up to that status, or a very ambitious editor to do it themselves. It also depends on the amount of information one can get to help fill out the article.
• Corvoe: I have contributed to several film articles that either gained good/featured status or already were good/featured status. I created and wrote The FP from scratch, mostly on my own. It is currently a good article under consideration for featured status. After my work with that article has wrapped up (or at least slowed down), I'm wanting to work on more established articles and get their statuses up to good or featured, particularly Children of Men (a film I believe to be one of the best).
• NinjaRobotPirate: No. I have contributed in a minor fashion to one article that is definitely headed toward Featured, but my contributions were limited mostly to advice, copy editing, and other support roles. My biggest accomplishment so far is cult film, which I rewrote from scratch and greatly expanded. I believe it to be nearly ready for GAN or even FAC, so we'll see how that goes. Most of the film-related articles that I edit are obscure art-house or cult films, barely notable horror films (I have created about 30-40 articles on zombie films alone), or independent films with limited releases. I consider it a major victory to get these articles up to C class, but there are a few that have possibilities. The kinds of films that I edit go quietly to direct-to-video hell, and I'm frequently the only thing standing between a vandal and Dolph Lundgren's being described as fighting waves of banana-men in a tutu.
• Lugnuts: No. I create stubs. Lots of stubs. I tried promoting a filmography for an actress to FL, using an existing FL as a guide, but it got shot down quicker than a Ukrainian jet-fighter.

Have you participated in any of WikiProject Film's task forces? What can be done to bolster the work of efforts by closer-knit groups?

• Erik: I helped set up the comic book films task force since I liked to contribute to such articles early on, but I've since moved on. As I stated earlier, I think many editors are usually content to work on their own projects, so collaboration does not come so readily. I would say an exception to that rule is the Indian films task force because of the growing film industry in the country and a growing number of Indian editors who write articles about these films. As for general bolstering, I do not think there is much to be done on a task force level, but I think we can try to encourage pairings or mentorships since two editors can collaborate easily enough.
• Favre1fan93: I am a part of the comic book films task force. The members of that group all have a similar work ethic and I can look to many of them to be adding content to these pages to help make it a simple process to nominate it for GA status. In my opinion, this is the genre of film right now, so I try to take pride in have fulfilling articles for these very popular films.
• Corvoe: I am a member of the comic book films task force, though I don't contribute there as often as I'd like to. Due to my tendency to only work full force on one article, I haven't done much more than grammar fixes, copy-editing, and reverting vandalism. I'm hoping to get more involved with this task force as I am able.
• Lugnuts: Yes. Mainly the ones around various elements of world cinema. I think others should be setup too (Polish cinema, for example). Although not many people are involved directly with them, lots of editors cross-over them with their work and they can be useful. I recently updated the scope of the Film Festival task force (can I do that? Yes, I Cannes).

Are some genres, time periods, or geographic areas better represented than others in Wikipedia articles? What can be done to improve the coverage of neglected film topics?

• Erik: Franchise films tend to be well-represented. These films tend to be the most visible and also have the most ongoing news coverage. For example, a franchise film's development process is followed much more closely than an independent film's filming process. Box office performance is also commonly reported. In addition, I think franchise films are well-served by the "average Wikipedian" demographic, as defined here. As for improving the coverage of neglected film topics, we can watch such articles and help new editors contribute to them. If a film with a neglected article makes headlines for whatever reason, we can use that as an opportunity to add content about films to educate visitors who will likely stop by.
• Corvoe: I agree with Erik. The more popular, big-budget franchises are almost always the ones with the most information, as they draw the largest audience. Even in the same basic genre, you have huge differences, like in comedy. You're never going to see films like The Grand Budapest Hotel or Chef get as much coverage as 22 Jump Street or This Is the End, unless you dedicate your own time to it or work with other editors. Independent films, especially those that don't win awards, get the short end of the stick, which is why I personally like to work there more than on big-budget films. As far as what there is to be done for this, all we can do is ask. If you're working on an article that you think needs some love from more than just you, go to WikiProject Film's talk page and ask someone for assistance. We're nice here.
• NinjaRobotPirate: You'd be surprised what isn't represented. Or maybe not. We all know that Wikipedia has certain biases. I have recently begun to create articles on contemporary South American horror films, and even the biggest blockbusters frequently have no article. I have also begun work on independent Canadian horror films, and I've crossed off about a dozen articles on that list. British, American, French, Italian, and Australian films are all well-represented, but we need a lot of work on even the most prestigious German films. We desperately need people who can translate articles from the German Wikipedia. As a direct-to-video connoisseur, I try to make sure that those films are create, updated, and kept free of vandalism. But we need more people to spend time on these obscure films. Surf Nazis Must Die has been a stub (of less than 250 words) for almost nine years. Rabid Grannies hasn't even hit 200 words yet in seven years.
• Lugnuts: When I first joined, I was shocked at the gaps in Ingmar Bergman's filmography, so I created all the missing articles. I thought this was because it was Swedish films on the English-language WP, but was even more shocked to find similar gaps in John Wayne's filmography! Most modern-day US/UK cinema is now very well covered on WP (by that, I mean at least having a stub). Step outside of that, and there are some big holes. The work I've done on the big film festivals crosses over lots of areas of world cinema and the coverage has increased alot since I've been here (you can thank me later). Maybe some work directly with the various over-arching WP projects (eg, WP:Poland, WP:Peru, etc) to focus on these under-represented sections.

How are forthcoming film releases treated? Are they required to meet the same sourcing and notability requirements of other film articles? Do deleted or merged articles about forthcoming films tend to be recreated after the film's release?

• Erik: The general rule of thumb is to only have a stand-alone article about a film once filming has begun. In the late 2000s, it was common to see articles created for films solely based on news reports that rights had been bought by a studio. In reality, that is a long way from validating the production of an actual film. We wrote guidelines for future films to address such articles, though there are interesting exceptions where a film languishes in development long enough to basically warrant writing the history of its struggles. It's hard to say what percentage of articles are recreated, but it does happen. What can happen is that news of development can be summarized in a broader article, such as the director's article or the source material's article, and when filming begins, the coverage can be put into a "Production" section of the new article to serve as background.
• Favre1fan93: This information has to be handled with care. Per WP:NFF, it is generally desired that films do not receive articles once they have started production. However, recently we have flirted with the idea of special exceptions, creating "Development of" articles. For example, before Star Wars Episode VII began its filming process, information regarding the film was at Development of Star Wars Episode VII. Especially on the articles I work on, there is such a strong desire for information, that we have to work really hard to make sure all information comes from reliable sources, and if the information is merely rumor or perhaps an exclusive news item. As for deleted or merged articles, it again goes back to WP:NFF. If once it has started production and still meets notability, a page may be recreated. I have also been drawn to the new Draft space, and encourage editors to use it, or use it as an alternative to deleting. It is also an area where we are crafting new MCU film articles, as we know that they will exist, but they do not warrant an article, just pertinent info in a section on another article.
• Corvoe: Upcoming films are a tricky area, since they are often surrounded with rumours. Like Favre1fan93 said, editors who mean well often add information that boils down to hearsay, and those editors get reverted unless they provide reliable sources. I actually think sourcing and information for upcoming films might be under stricter surveillance than films that are already released, as we try our best not to report any falsehoods. There is also an increasingly prevalent issue involving plagiarism, as many editors will quote an official synopsis (usually filled with weasel words) and pass it off as Wikipedia's own writing. Overall, though, I would say upcoming film articles are among the best-monitored.
• Lugnuts: Working on the film festival side of the project, I do create a fair few future films (f-f-f-f...). A small minority of these have been proded by other editors or taken to AfD. They all end in keep. WP:GNG > WP:NFF. The deletion discussion goes along the lines of "but the film hasn't even been released!" To which I reply, "no it hasn't, but it's been selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in 2 weeks time!" A quick Google search will find a ton of coverage on even the most obscure films in competition.

How often do the project's members deal with disruptive edits by fans, publicists, or detractors of a particular director, performer, or film series? What are the best ways to respond to these individuals? Have you seen any become productive members of the Wikipedia community?

• Erik: In my experience, disruption tends to happen with non-notable films. Once in a while, a filmmaker will try to create an article about their film. We editors have to explain the notability guidelines, and it's rare to convert the filmmaker into an editor since their goal on Wikipedia was to have their article for the film. As for detractors, we are usually able to go through the dispute resolution process and figure out a solution. Since controversies are usually rooted in reality, the solutions are just a matter of structuring content. WP:STRUCTURE says, "Try to achieve a more neutral text by folding debates into the narrative, rather than isolating them into sections that ignore or fight against each other," and that's what we try to do.
• Favre1fan93: Again for the articles that I work on, there are constantly rumors and other information released on unreliable sources. So editors or IP who come to the article having seen that info on those sites, and don't see it on the article, add it. So in those cases, it is generally a good faith edit, not knowing our policies. Other times, you will find someone really persistent that takes more of the community to deal with, but that does not happen a lot. Many of these disruptive edits come once the film has released. And sometimes, these edits create more work for regular editors of the page to fix, that it has to warrant protection to keep it under control. I don't believe I have ever experienced a director or performer trying to edit on one of their films.
• NinjaRobotPirate: I agree with Erik. Every once in a while, I'll check my watchlist and find that an IP editor replaced a fully-developed reception with, "It was met with critical acclaim. Only people who misunderstood the director's intent disliked it." It's a simple job to revert this. It's rare that I find a completely unresponsive vandal. Most people are reasonable when I contact them on their talk page, and a few have been downright friendly and helpful once I politely explained my issues with their edits. However, I have run into publicists, filmmakers, and vandals who were immensely frustrating to clean up after. Page protection seems to be the only way to stop them.
• Lugnuts: Revert all IP edits and treat them with the disdain they deserve. But what about WP:AGF? Well after the 876th IP vandalism edit, it doesn't wash. I had one IP claiming to be the film's director and demanding I stop removing his edits. They weren't constructive and less than biased. Attention insects, the foot of reckoning is here.

What are the most urgent needs of WikiProject Film? How can a new contributor help today?

• Erik: I would say that we could always use more content. While it is great to see new editors make adjustments to the film infoboxes or the plot summaries, the reality is that changes can go back and forth, and that plot summaries are constantly rewritten. In contrast, if you can add real-world coverage about a film, such as its production or critical reception, it is very likely to have an enduring place in the article. If you're new and want to contribute, be bold and be willing to ask questions!
• Corvoe: A lot of films that meet our notability guidelines are nowhere to be found in our article space, and that issue will likely exist indefinitely. That said, users are welcomed and encouraged to make articles with reliable sources. Experienced editors are almost always willing to lend a helping hand, and are always polite when informing an article's creator that the subject matter may not meet the notability requirements. Often, newer editors struggle with finding good sources, but there is a surplus of editors who are more than capable of helping with that. I would say that new contributors should do what I did, and dive straight in. Worst case scenario, you do some stuff wrong and you learn from it. If you mean well, there will always be people there to help you out, so ask away!
• NinjaRobotPirate: Plot summaries. Anyone can write a plot summary. Don't worry about length or grammar. I'll be around eventually to clean it up. Try the template {{Rotten Tomatoes score}}. It uses a bot to retrieve Rotten Tomatoes scores.
• Lugnuts: Better coverage of non-US films.

Anything else you'd like to add?

• Erik: One of the reasons I enjoy working on film articles is that it is an opportunity to tell the story of a film to a global audience. Coverage of a film can be scattered, and Wikipedia is a great tool to bring together all that coverage. If you work to make a film article comprehensive, you are basically making that web page the best place anywhere to read about a film. It's a satisfying feeling to put together all these details and see the article traffic statistics and know how many readers learned new things about the film.
• NinjaRobotPirate: If you see a plot summary that ends with a question mark, it's probably a copyright violation. Normal people don't end a plot summary with a question mark or teaser. If you see something like "95 min." in the infobox, then everything in the infobox was probably copypasted from the IMDb. Double check the data in a reliable source to make sure that the values are correct. If you see a link to Rotten Tomatoes in the External links, but there's no reception section, the film probably received a negative reception. I guess that's just a sardonic observation.
• Lugnuts: Whoever brings me the head of Tim Burton will get a shiny new donkey.
  
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2014-06-25

Power users and diversity in WikiProjects; the "network of cultures" in multilingual Wikipedia biographies

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By Taha Yasseri, Maximilian Klein, Piotr Konieczny, Kim Osman, and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

New book: Global Wikipedia

Global Wikipedia

Author	Pnina Fichman and Noriko Hara
Language	English
Subject	Wikipedia
Publisher	Rowman & Littlefield
Publication date	2014
Publication place	United States
Pages	178
ISBN	978-0810891012

An edited volume^[1] by Pnina Fichman and Noriko Hara from Indiana University, Bloomington was released on May 23, 2014, subtitled "International and Cross-cultural Issues in Online Collaboration". The book description states that "dozens of books about Wikipedia are available, but they all focus on the English Wikipedia and assume an Anglo-Saxon perspective, while disregarding cultural and language variability or multi-cultural collaborative efforts". The description claims that this is "the first book to address this gap by focusing attention on the global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of Wikipedia." The book contains nine chapters authored by 16 Wikipedia researchers (including a chapter authored by the volume editors). Among the topics covered are international and cross-cultural conflict and collaboration, case studies in the Chinese, Finnish, French, and Greek Wikipedias, and Wikipedia gender gaps in different language sites.

"Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions"

Review by Maximilianklein (talk)

This research by Eom et al.^[2] is an exploratory data analysis of figures (roughly, "people") from a mining of date and place of birth and gender in biography articles. Presenting novel ideas based on the infamous Google PageRank algorithm, this paper is a sort of computational history. The methods used are standard – if not a bit dated – compared with more contemporary research using Wikidata. This is a shame because newer techniques would have allowed the claims of a quantified cultural influence factor to rest on firmer grounds.

Their method is for each of their 24 Wikipedia languages (approximately the top 24 largest ones) to construct the network where nodes are biography articles, and links are intrawiki-links. Then they rank each node by both PageRank and 2DRank. PageRank says your importance is a recursive function of your incoming links, weighted by the page rank of each incoming linker; CheiRank is the same as PageRank, but using outgoing links instead. 2DRank is a mixture of PageRank and CheiRank. Some of the authors have coauthored earlier papers that similarly examined PageRank and CheiRank for biographical and other Wikipedia articles (see our previous coverage: "How Wikipedia's Google matrix differs for politicians and artists" and "Multilingual ranking analysis: Napoleon and Michael Jackson as Wikipedia's 'global heroes'").

However, the input to these algorithms is the weak part. The base set consists of all of the articles that are in a subcategory of Biographies of Living People, Births by Year, or Deaths by Year. Obtaining 1.1 million biography articles, they acknowledge that this isn't a full set because it is based off English Wikipedia, but then make an anecdotal claim that it's only 2% off. However, with the latest Wikidata information we know of at least 2.08 million "people" with Wikipedia articles^[3].

The rest of their method consists of finding the top 100 articles in each of the 24 languages using both PageRank and 2DRank. Then they get birth place, birthdate and gender from DBpedia if available, and if not they look up this information manually. They pigeonhole each article into one of the 24 target cultures based on birth place, and use a "World" category if none applies. Simplifying assumptions are also made during these processes: modern borders are used, and each country is assumed to speak only a single language. So Kant is Russian and all Belgians speak Dutch in this research.

There is an exploratory analysis of these top 100 by geography, time, and gender. The results confirm a long-told story: the biographies that the English Wikipedia knows about are heavily skewed towards being Western/European, modern, and male. They make points of showing local favour, e.g. Hindi has many in their top 100 who are born in India. With regard to history, the authors note that the Arabic Wikipedia is more interested in history than what world growth would suppose. Another measure is defined to look at the localness factor by decade – that is, what percentage of top figures in this decade were born in this language-place? Of course it's Greeks early on, and the US dominating later.

On gender, their results indicate 5.1% or 10.1% by PageRank and 2DRank, respectively, are female of the top 100s, averaged. The authors make mention that maleness does decrease over time as well. This reported figure is more severe than the overlap with any single language, so the authors show some "wisdom of the crowds" effect.

The final analysis tries to quantify cultural influence. A "network of cultures" is made, where nodes are each of the 24 languages-cum-cultures, and the directed, weighted edges are the number of foreigners in their top 100. For instance, in the English Wikipedia's top 100, five people were born in France; so England connects to France with a weight of 5. With this "network of cultures" in hand, they apply the PageRank and 2DRank algorithms to rank each culture. This is a novel approach to making statistical what we all often guess at. Even despite the fact that Jesus is considered Arabic through their simplifications, PageRank turns up English and German as top and runner-up, respectively. Using 2DRank, Greek, French and Russian get more due.

In summary, although this cultural research suffers from biased data, some clever ideas are implemented – particularly the "network of cultures". The implication is that statistical history somewhat corroborates the opinions of manually conducted history.

"Recommending reference materials in context to facilitate editing Wikipedia"

This article^[4] describes IntelWiki, a set of MediaWiki tools designed to facilitate new editor's engagement by making research easier. The tool "automatically generates resource recommendations, ranks the references based on the occurrence of salient keywords, and allows users to interact with the recommended references within the Wikipedia editor." The researchers find that volunteers using this tool were more productive, contributing more high-quality text. The studied group was composed of 16 editors with no Wikipedia editing experience, who completed two editing tasks in a sandbox wiki, one using a mockup Wikipedia editing interface and Google search engine, and using the IntelWiki interface and reference search engine. The author's reference suggestion tool seems valuable, unfortunately this reviewer was unable to locate any proof that the developer engaged the Wikipedia community, or made his code or the tool publicly available for further testing. The research and the thesis does not discuss the differences between their MediaWiki clone and Wikipedia in any significant details. Based on the limited description, the study's overall conclusions may not be reliable, since the mockup Wikipedia interface used for the comparison seems to be a default MediaWiki clone, lacking many Wikipedia-specific tools; therefore the theme of comparing IntelWiki to Wikipedia is a bit misleading.

While the study is interesting, it is disappointing that the main purpose appears to be completing a thesis,^[5] with little thought to actually improving Wikipedia (by developing public tools and/or releasing open code). (See also: related webpage, YouTube video)

"What do Chinese-language microblog users do with Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia?"

This paper ^[6] (accepted for presentation at OpenSym 2014, and subtitled "A case study of information engagement") explores the use of the Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike encyclopedia by Chinese microblog (Twitter, Sina Weibo) users through qualitative and quantitative analyses of Chinese microblog postings. Both encyclopedias are often cited by microblog users, and are very popular in China to the extent that the words "wiki" and "baidu" have become verbs meaning to look up content on the respective websites, analogous to "to google" in English.

One of the study's major focuses is the impact of Internet censorship in China; particularly since Wikipedia is not censored – but access to it, and its discussion in most Chinese websites may be. Baidu Baike is both censored and more likely to host copyright violating content. Despite Baidu Baike's copyright violating content, many users still prefer the uncensored and more reliable Chinese Wikipedia, though they can become frustrated by not being able to access it due to censorship. Whether some Wikipedia content is censored or not is seen by some as a measure of the topic's political sensitivity. The author suggests that a distinguishing characteristic can be observed between groups that prefer one encyclopedia over the other, but does not discuss this in detail, suggesting a very interesting research avenue.

Content or people? Achieving critical mass to promote growth in WikiProjects

Review by Kimaus

In a recent paper^[7], Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash investigate the question of sustainability in online communities by analysing trends in the growth of WikiProjects. Solomon and Wash track revisions and membership in over one thousand WikiProjects over a period of five years to examine how the concept of a critical mass can influence a community’s development. The key question being, as the title of the paper states: “Critical mass of what?” Is it achieving a certain number of contributions or a certain number of members that will ensure the future sustainability of an online group?

Using critical mass theory, which describes groups as having an accelerating, linear or decelerating production function, the authors modelled a growth curve for each community. They found that the majority of WikiProjects had an accelerating growth regarding the number of revisions, however a decelerating growth in accruing members which suggests that existing editors are increasing individual contributions to the projects. In further examining this trend Solomon and Wash focus on the early years of projects’ existence to determine whether amassing content or editors in this formative period influences future production functions.

Their modelling shows that a greater number and diversity of editors within a project positively affects the number of revisions accumulated after five years (where diversity is calculated through membership in other WikiProjects). Interestingly, the modelling showed contributions by infrequent participants helped a project grow, but this can be offset by "overparticipation from a project’s power users." They attribute this to members' feeling that they can make a difference to projects that have diverse and sparse contributions. They do note, however, that increased contributions from power users may simply be an attempt to keep a project afloat, and that this effort is ultimately futile in certain cases. In sum, the authors find that it is a critical mass of people (who hold a variety of skills and knowledge) contributing small amounts in the early stages that positively affects a project’s growth and future sustainability.

"Prediction of Foreign Box Office Revenues Based on Wikipedia Page Activity"

In a paper^[8] presented at the ChASM Workshop of WebSci'14, Bloomington, Indiana, this month, de Silva and Compton, have generalised a method, previously introduced by Mestyán, Yasseri, and Kertész (see the newsletter review) to predict the box office revenues of movies based on the Wikipedia edits and page-view counts. Of these two metrics, the new paper considers only the page-view statistics of articles about the movies, but extends the sample of movies to include non-American movies as well. Samples of movies in the US, Japan, Australia, the UK, and Germany are studied. The authors concluded: "although the method proposed by Mestyán et al. predicts films’ opening weekend box office revenues in the United States and Australia with reasonable accuracy, its performance drops significantly when applied to various foreign markets. ... we used the model to predict the opening weekend box office revenues generated by films in British, Japanese, and German theatres, [and] found its accuracy to be far from satisfactory."

Briefly

• "Building academic literacy and research skills by contributing to Wikipedia": A survey^[9] of research skills of a group of students at an Australian institution showed that purposeful engaging with Wikipedia, including contributing to it, improved their academic skillset.

  

• "Google and Bing reintroduce national boundaries more so than Wikipedia does": In a blog post titled "How does Wikipedia cover the world differently than Google (or Bing)?",^[10] researcher Han-Teng Liao examines this question by looking at the case of Belgium, which has several language areas. While the two search engines offer a national portal page (google.be / be.bing.com) in different language options, "Wikipedia organizes its users and information less along the lines of national differences and more along the lines of language differences. According to various traffic reports provided by the Wikimedia foundation, users from Belgium contribute to viewing and editing activities mostly in its Dutch, French and English versions."

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

• "Inferring Semantic Facets of a Music Folksonomy with Wikipedia"^[11]
• "Towards linking libraries and Wikipedia: automatic subject indexing of library records with Wikipedia concepts"^[12]
• Pandemic page views in online news media and Wikipedia: From the English abstract of this German-language paper^[13]: "... a time-series analysis is done comparing the amount of the coverage of eleven online media on the EHEC pandemic in summer 2011 and the amount of page requests for articles in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia relevant to EHEC. Overall, analyses show strong correlations but also temporary discrepancies, appearing because page requests do not only depict the public agenda but also existing uncertainty about an issue."
• "What makes a good team of Wikipedia editors? A preliminary statistical analysis"^[14]. From the abstract: "The paper concerns studying the quality of teams of Wikipedia authors with statistical approach. ... The analysis confirmed that the key issue significantly influencing article’s quality are discussions between teem [sic] members. The second part of the paper successfully uses machine learning models to predict good articles based on features of the teams that created them."
• "A computational linguistic approach towards understanding Wikipedia’s article for deletion (AfD) discussions"^[15]. From the abstract: "In this thesis we aim to solve two main problems: 1) how to help new users effectively participate in the [deletion] discussion; and 2) how to make it efficient for administrators to make decision based on the discussion. To solve the first problem, we obtain a knowledge repository for new users by recognizing imperatives. We propose a method to detect imperatives based on syntactic analysis of the texts. And the result shows a good precision and reasonable recall. To solve the second problem, we propose a decision making support system that provides administrators with an reorganized overview of a discussion."

References

1. ^ Fichman, Pnina (2014). Global Wikipedia : international and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780810891012.
2. ^ Eom, Young-Ho; Pablo Aragón; David Laniado; Andreas Kaltenbrunner; Sebastiano Vigna; Dima L. Shepelyansky (2014-05-28). "Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions". arXiv:1405.7183.
3. ^ Klein, Max. "Sex Ratios in Wikidata".
4. ^ Mohammad Noor Nawaz and Andrea Bunt (2014) IntelWiki: recommending resources to help users contribute to Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2014), 12 pp., forthcoming. PDF
5. ^ [1]
6. ^ Liao, Han-Teng (2014-06-17). "What do Chinese-language microblog users do with Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia?".
7. ^ Solomon, Jacob; Rick Wash (2014-05-16). "Critical mass of what? Exploring community growth in WikiProjects". Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
8. ^ de Silva, Brian; Ryan Compton (2014-05-22). "Prediction of foreign box office revenues based on wikipedia page activity". arXiv:1405.5924.
9. ^ Miller, Julia (2014-06-13). "Building academic literacy and research skills by contributing to Wikipedia: A case study at an Australian university". Journal of Academic Language and Learning. 8 (2): A72–A86. ISSN 1835-5196.
10. ^ Liao, Han-Teng (2014-05-13). "How does Wikipedia cover the world differently than Google (or Bing)?".
11. ^ Sordo, Mohamed; Fabien Gouyon; Luís Sarmento; Òscar Celma; Xavier Serra (2013). "Inferring semantic facets of a music folksonomy with Wikipedia". Journal of New Music Research. 42 (4): 346–363. doi:10.1080/09298215.2013.848904. ISSN 0929-8215. Retrieved 2014-06-28.
12. ^ Joorabchi, Arash; Abdulhussain E. Mahdi (2014-04-01). "Towards linking libraries and Wikipedia: automatic subject indexing of library records with Wikipedia concepts" (PDF). Journal of Information Science. 40 (2): 211–221. doi:10.1177/0165551513514932. ISSN 0165-5515. Retrieved 2014-06-28.
13. ^ Holbach, Thomas; Marcus Maurer. "Wissenswerte Nachrichten". Publizistik: 1–17. doi:10.1007/s11616-013-0191-z. ISSN 0033-4006.
14. ^ Bukowski, Leszek; Michał Jankowski-Lorek; Szymon Jaroszewicz; Marcin Sydow (2014-01-01). "What makes a good team of Wikipedia editors? A preliminary statistical analysis". In Akiyo Nadamoto; Adam Jatowt; Adam Wierzbicki; Jochen L. Leidner (eds.). Social Informatics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 14–28. ISBN 978-3-642-55284-7.
15. ^ Mao, Wanting. A computational linguistic approach towards understanding Wikipedia’s article for deletion (AfD) discussions. Master's thesis The University of Western Ontario, 2014. PDF

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