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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
2024–2025 research grants - taking stock
[edit]- By Alaexis
The Research Fund is a Wikimedia initiative that supports individuals, groups, and organizations with expertise and interest in conducting research on or about Wikimedia projects
. The main funding criterion is whether the grant would result in high-quality and high-impact scholarship
. Grant sizes range from 2 to 50 thousand USD and work must be completed within 12 months. Since the previous batch of grants was issued in summer 2024, those projects should now be finished making this a good time to examine the results. The nine projects in this batch received over 400,000 USD in total funding.
Out of 9 projects in that batch, 5 have published their results on Meta Research pages. For the remaining 4 projects without published results, I reached out to the researchers directly and added their responses to the Notes column in the table below.
The research is supposed to
- Contribute to generalizable knowledge that has the potential to improve and expand our understanding of the Wikimedia projects and their impact;
- Identify and/or evaluate novel technical and socio-technical solutions that can enhance the technology or policy in support of the Wikimedia projects;
- Inform important social or policy decisions that organized groups within the Wikimedia communities want to make.
- [Create] datasets of importance for Wikimedia communities (including but not limited to Wikimedia research communities).
Notable findings
[edit]Daniel Baránek and Veronika Kršková compared the coverage of Wikidata with that of a Czech biographical dictionary. They found that more than a quarter of dictionary entries were missing from Wikidata (and likely from Wikipedia as well). Fascinatingly, further research showed that the gap reflected different notions of notability now and in the past. Many missing persons were principals and professors who played major roles during nationalist tensions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Brett Buttliere, Matt Vetter and Sage Ross tried to solve the problem of low academic engagement on Wikipedia. They identified reasons why scholars do not edit Wikipedia: academic contributions to Wikipedia aren't measured and valued in the academic community and there is general skepticism about the reliability of Wikipedia. We all want more experts on Wikipedia, so it's good to have more data about the problem. See the Research Page for the solutions that the authors proposed and implemented.
Personally, I'd be very interested in the results of the AI tagging for Commons initiative, as well as in the two projects addressing the gender gap. Unfortunately their results are unavailable as of October 18.
Gaps and concerns
[edit]While the Research Fund supports important work, several issues emerged from this batch:
- Incomplete reporting: 4 out of 9 projects have not published results on Meta, even though the grant period has ended.
- Unpublished datasets: some projects that could benefit the community haven't shared their underlying data. For example, the biographical dictionaries comparison identified specific gaps in Wikidata coverage, but the dataset of missing entries hasn't been published (happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
- Uncertain scholarly impact: the fund aims to support "high-quality and high-impact scholarship," but measuring impact is challenging, especially for research generating "generalizable knowledge" rather than artifacts that Wikipedians can use right away. As far as I can tell, none of these projects have yet resulted in peer-reviewed publications.
Table
[edit]| Project name | Link to programs page | Link to research page | Results | Amount, USD | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikidata for the People of Africa | [1] | [2] | yes | 40,000 | |
| Development of a training program for teachers to use Wikipedia as a resource for collaborative learning and the development of skills for digital citizenship | [3] | [4] | no | 50,000 | Results expected in December 2025 |
| Bridging the Gap Between Wikipedians and Scientists with Terminology-Aware Translation: A Case Study in Turkish | [5] | [6] | yes | 50,000 | |
| Wikimedia versus traditional biographical encyclopedias. Overlaps, gaps, quality and future possibilities | [7] | [8] | yes | 50,000 | |
| System Design for Increasing Adoption of AI-Assisted Image Tagging in Wikimedia Commons | [9] | [10] | no | 49,500 | Data collected by December 2024 |
| Investigating Neurodivergent Wikimedian Experiences | [11] | [12] | yes | 22,000 | An open access publication is in the works |
| Developing Wikimedia Impact Metrics as a Sociotechnical Solution for Encouraging Funder/ Academic Engagement | [13] | [14] | yes | 42,000 | |
| Cover Women | [15] | [16] | no | 32,000 | |
| Addressing Wikipedia's Gender Gaps Through Social Media Ads | [17] | [18] | no | 30,000 | At the data collection phase in October 2025 |
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Briefly
[edit]- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
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Other recent publications
[edit]Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
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References
[edit]- Supplementary references and notes:
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