The Signpost

Recent research

Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama top "Wikipedia social network"; featured article editing patterns in 12 languages

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

Mean amount of content added per edit, per editor's experience level (illustration from "607 Journalists")
  • "607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of breaking news and current events"[6] See also blog post
  • "Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the 'news' on Wikipedia"[7] From the abstract: "The case studies include the "Barack Obama" article, which is used to investigate the establishment and maintenance of the "fact" that Obama is described as an 'African American,' despite his mixed-race heritage. ... The second case study uses the article on the 2008 war in the Georgian province of South Ossetia to investigate the transnational and transcultural pitfalls of 'bias' in the writing of a 'neutral' article. The final case examines the decision to publish controversial material by examining the article on the 2006 Muhammad cartoons controversy. This article was crucial on Wikipedia in establishing the protocol in publishing such images."
  • "User interaction with community processes in online communities"[8] From the abstract: "We find that articles that are deleted from Wikipedia differ from those that are not in many significant ways. We also find, however, that most deleted articles are deleted extremely hastily, often before they have time to develop. We use our data to create a model that can predict with high precision whether or not an article will be deleted. ... We propose to deploy a system utilizing this model on Wikipedia as a set of decision-support tools to help article creators evaluate and improve their articles before posting. ... English Wikipedia’s Articles for Creation provides a protected space for drafting new articles, which are reviewed against minimum quality guidelines before they are published. We explore the possibility that this drafting process, which is intended to improve the success of newcomers, in fact decreases newcomer productivity in English Wikipedia, and offer recommendations for system designers."
  • "Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages"[9]
More recent publications
  • "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Evidence on Wikipedia"[10] From the abstract: "[On the German Wikipedia, the featuring of an article on the main page does] affect neighboring articles substantially: Their viewership increases by almost 70 percent. This, in turn, translates to increased editing activity. Attention is the driving mechanism behind views and short edits. Both outcomes are related to the order of links, while more substantial edits are not." See also by the same author: "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content"
  • "Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from German Wikipedia"[11] From the abstract: "editors who contribute to the same articles and exchange comments on articles’ talk pages work in collaborative manner sometimes discussing their work. They can, therefore, be considered as peers, who are likely to influence each other. In this article, I examine whether peer influence, measured by the average amount of peer contributions or by the number of peers, yields spillovers to the amount of individual contributions."
  • "Wikipedia Page View Reflects Web Search Trend""[12] (see also datasets, slides) From the abstract: "We found frequently searched keywords to have remarkably high correlations with Wikipedia page views."
  • "Wikipedia edition dynamics"[13] From the abstract: "It is argued that the probability to edit is proportional to the editor's number of previous editions (preferential attachment), to the editor's fitness and to an ageing factor." See also by the same authors: "The dynamic nature of conflict in Wikipedia"
  • "Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Affinity on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages"[14] See also "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures"
  • "The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects"[15] From the abstract: "The evaluation suggests that an intermediate level of cohesion with a core of influential users dominating network flow improves effectiveness for a WikiProject, and that greater average membership tenure relates to project efficiency in a positive way."
  • "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites"[16] From the abstract: "Using an adapted taxonomy, this article identifies the technological features on predominant social media sites—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia—that encourage and constrain users from engaging in generative activities. Notwithstanding the conflicting narrative painted by recent litigation around copyright in relation to content on social media sites, I observe that some of the main technological features on social media sites are designed around copyright considerations." (However, the paper never mentions that Wikipedia's content is under a free license.) "In contrast to the other social media sites, I note that Wikipedia does not allow its users to comment on content; hence there is little room for this alternative form of modification."
  • "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction"[17]
  • "Students' use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness"[18] (survey of 1658 undergraduate students) From the abstract: "87.5% of students report using Wikipedia for their academic work, with 24.0% of these considering it ‘very useful’. Use and perceived usefulness of Wikipedia differs by students’ gender; year of study; cultural background and subject studied. Wikipedia mainly plays an introductory and/or clarificatory role in students information gathering and research."
  • "Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce"[19] From the abstract: "[Using] MapReduce ... we are able to explore a very large dataset, consisting of over 5 millions articles [actually pages on enwiki, including non-articles] collaboratively edited by 14 millions authors, resulting in over 8 billion pairwise interactions. We represent Wikipedia as a signed network, where positive arcs imply constructive interaction between editors. We then isolate a set of high reputation editors (i.e., nodes having many positive incoming links) and classify the remaining ones based on their interactions with high reputation editors."
  • "An agent-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached"[20] From the abstract: "We show that increasing the number of credible or trustworthy agents and agents with a neutral point of view decreases the time taken to reach consensus, whereas the duration is longest when agents with opposing views are in equal proportion." See also last issue's review of a different numerical model of edit wars: "More newbies mean more conflict, but extreme tolerance can still achieve eternal peace"

References

  1. ^ Blikstad-Balas, Marte (2015). ""You get what you need" : A study of students' attitudes towards using Wikipedia when doing school assignments". Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. 3831 (October): 1–15.Closed access icon
  2. ^ Johanna Geiß, Andreas Spitz, Michael Gertz: Beyond Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network PDF
  3. ^ Park Sung Joo, Kim Jong Woo, Lee Hong Joo, Park Hyunjung, Han Deugcheon, and Gloor Peter. Exploration of Online Culture Through Network Analysis of Wikipedia. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cyber.2014.0638 Closed access icon
  4. ^ Hamiti, Mentor; Susuri, Arsim; Dika, Agni. "Machine Learning and the Detection of Anomalies in Wikipedia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers.
  5. ^ de La Robertie, Baptiste; Pitarch, Yoann; Teste, Olivier. "Measuring Article Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network" (PDF).
  6. ^ Joseph R. B. Sutherland: 607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of breaking news and current events. Dissertation, Aberdeen Business School - Robert Gordon University, April 2015 PDF
  7. ^ Lyons, J. Michael: Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the "news" on Wikipedia. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2015, 206 pages; [1] Closed access icon
  8. ^ Gelley, Shoshana Bluma. User interaction with community processes in online communities. Dissertation, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, 2015 [2] Closed access icon
  9. ^ Khoi-Nguyen Dao Tran: Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The Australian National University, May 2015 PDF
  10. ^ Kummer, Michael E. (2014-12-29). Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Evidence on Wikipedia. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2567179.
  11. ^ Olga Slivko: Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from German Wikipedia. Discussion Paper No. 14-128, Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). December 22, 2014, updated March 3, 2015 PDF
  12. ^ Mitsuo Yoshida, Yuki Arase, Takaaki Tsunoda, Mikio Yamamoto. Wikipedia Page View Reflects Web Search Trend. The 2015 ACM Web Science conference (WebSci15). Oxford, UK, June 28 - July 1, 2015. Authors' copy
  13. ^ Gandica, Y.; F. Sampaio dos Aidos; J. Carvalho (2014-12-30). "Wikipedia edition dynamics". arXiv:1412.8657.
  14. ^ Paul Laufer: Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Affinity on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages. Master Thesis, TU Graz, August 2014 PDF
  15. ^ Xiangju Qin, Pádraig Cunningham, Michael Salter-Townshend: The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects. Social Networks Volume 43, October 2015, Pages 1–15 doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2015.04.002 Closed access icon
  16. ^ Tan Ms, Corinne (2015). "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites". Intellectual Property Quarterly (1): 62–78.
  17. ^ Grundkiewicz, Roman; Junczys-Dowmunt, Marcin (2014-09-17). "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction". In Adam Przepiórkowski; Maciej Ogrodniczuk (eds.). Advances in Natural Language Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing. pp. 478–490. ISBN 978-3-319-10888-9. Closed access icon
  18. ^ Neil Selwyna, Stephen Gorardb: Students' use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness. The Internet and Higher Education, Volume 28, January 2016, Pages 28–34 doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004 Closed access icon
  19. ^ Michele Spina, Dario Rossi, Mauro Sozio, Silviu Maniu, Bogdan Cautis: Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), doi:10.1109/ICC.2015.7248477. PDF (authors' copy)
  20. ^ Arun Kalyanasundaram, Wei Wei, Kathleen M. Carley, James D. Herbsleb: An agent-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached. Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference, L. Yilmaz, W. K V. Chan, I. Moon, T. M. K. Roeder, C. Macal, and M. D. Rossetti, eds. PDF.

















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