Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-25/Recent research

Recent research

(descriptive subtitle here)

By Piotr Konieczny, Axl, ...

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

Most important people of all times, according to four Wikipedia

This social network analysis looks at the entire corpus of Wikipedia biographies (with data from English, Chinese, Japanese and German Wikipedias). The authors created several thousand networks (unfortunately, this short conference paper does not discuss precisely how) and used the PageRank algorithm to identify key individuals.

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 (the most prominent people, for the four Wikipedias, appear to be George W. Bush, Mao Zedong, Ikuhiko Hata and Adolf Hitler, respectively). The Eastern cultures seem to prioritize warriors and politicians; Western ones include more cultural (including religious) figures. Interesting findings concern globalization: "While the English Wikipedia includes 80% non-English leaders among the top 50, just two non-Chinese made it into the top 50 of the Chinese Wikipedia... "Japanese Wikipedia is slightly more balanced, with almost 40 percent non-Japanese leaders". Findings for the German Wikipedia are not presented. Through the authors don't make that point, it seems that no women appear in the Top 10 lists presented. Overall, this seems like an interesting paper (it also received a writeup in Technology Review), through the brief form (two pages) means that many questions about methodology remain unanswered, and the presentation of findings, and analysis, are very curt. On a side note, one can wonder whether this paper is truly related to anthropology; given that the only time this field is referred to in this work is when the authors mention that they are "replacing anthropological fieldwork with statistical analysis of the treatment given by native speakers of a culture to different subjects in Wikipedia."

"Wikipedia a reliable learning resource for medical students? Evaluating respiratory topics"

A paper in Advances in Physiology Education claims to assess the suitability of Wikipedia's respiratory articles for medical student learning. Forty Wikipedia articles on respiratory topics were sampled on 27 April 2014. These articles were assessed by three researchers with a modified version of the DISCERN tool. Article references were checked for accuracy and typography. Readability was assessed with the Flesch–Kincaid and Coleman–Liau tools.

The paper found a wide range of accuracy scores using the modified DISCERN tool, from 14.67 for "[Nail] clubbing" to 38.33 for "Tuberculosis". Incorrect, incomplete or inconsistent formatting of references were commonly found, although these were not quantified in the paper. Readability of the articles was typically at a college level. On the basis of these findings, the paper declares Wikipedia's respiratory articles as unsuitable for medical students.

The paper's author apparently uses an arbitrary unvalidated modification of the DISCERN tool to assess the accuracy of articles. The nature of this modification is not specified, nor is it available at the journal's website as claimed by the paper.

The DISCERN tool does not assess accuracy. Rather, it is designed to assess "information about treatment choices specifically for health consumers". As such, the use of this tool is inappropriate to assess suitability for medical students.

The paper's author fails to acknowledge that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Several of the DISCERN tool's questions are unsuitable for an encyclopedia. DISCERN questions such as "Does it describe how each treatment works?" and "Does it describe the risks of each treatment?" would be answered on other Wikipedia pages, not on the disease article's page. The paper's author makes an a priori assumption that the medical textbooks used for comparison are perfect sources. The author does not assess those textbooks with the DISCERN tool.

The paper states "[t]he number of citations from peer-reviewed journals published in the last 5 yr was only 312 (19%)." However this is far superior to the number of citations in the textbooks listed. The chapter on "Neoplasms of the lung" in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (18th edition) contains no citations at all. Seven sources are listed in its "Further readings" section, of which only one is from the last five years.

The paper states that the article on "clubbing... had no references or external links." This is incorrect. On 27 April 2014, Wikipedia's article on "Nail clubbing" had ten references.

Several of the articles are at a rudimentary stage, containing limited information and lacking appropriate references. However two articles, "Lung cancer" and "Diffuse panbronchiolitis", were assessed by Wikipedia's editors at the highest standard and awarded "Featured article" status. Five more articles, "Asthma", "Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease", "Pneumonia", "Pneumothorax" and "Tuberculosis", reached "Good article" standard. These articles are exceptionally detailed, accurate, and well-referenced. Azer's paper makes no mention of the high quality of these articles.

The paper uses an unvalidated tool for an inappropriate purpose without applying a suitable comparator, and inevitably draws incorrect conclusions.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is not a medical textbook, nor is it intended to replace medical textbooks. Rather, it should be used as a starting point by medical students. The quality of an individual article should be quickly assessed by the reader, and information can be confirmed in the references provided. Missing information should be sought from other sources such as textbooks. Students should be encouraged to use Wikipedia alongside medical textbooks to assist their learning.

Disclosure: I (Axl) am a Wikipedia editor, a pulmonologist, the main author of Wikipedia's "Lung cancer" article, and a major contributor to other respiratory articles.

Most academics are not concerned about Wikipedia's quality - but many think their colleagues are

This recent study is a valuable contribution to the small body of work on academics attitudes towards Wikipedia, and is the largest-scale survey in that field so far, with nearly a 1000 valid responses from the faculty at two Spanish universities. The authors find that Wikipedia is generally held in a positive regard (nearly half of the respondents think it is useful for teaching, while less than 20% disagree; similar numbers use it for general information gathering, through the numbers are split at about 35% on whether they use it for research within their own discipline). Almost 10% of the respondents say that they use it frequently for some teaching purposes. The numbers of those who discourage students from using it and those who encourage student to consult the site are nearly equal, at approximately quarter of the sample each. Almost a half have no strong feelings on this, and less than 15% strongly disagrees with students' use of Wikipedia - a finding that certainly suggests that the past few years have witnessed a major shift in academia (less than a decade ago, the stories of professors banning Wikipedia were quite common). Unsurprisingly, the faculty is much less likely to cite Wikipedia, with only about 10% admitting they do so. Almost 90% of the academics think Wikipedia is easy to use, but only about 15% think editing is easy - with over 40% disagreeing with that statement. About 2% of respondents describe themselves as very frequent contributors to the side, and 6% as frequent. Over 40% have no thoughts on Wikipedia editing and reviewing system, which leads the authors to suggest that "that most faculty do not actually know Wikipedia‘s specific editing system very well nor the way the [site's] peer-review process works". Asked about Wikipedia's quality, those who think Wikipedia articles are reliable outnumber those who disagree 2:1 (at 40% to 20%), with an even higher ratio (over 3:1) of those who agree that Wikipedia articles are up to date. The respondents are equally divided, however, on whether the articles are comprehensive or not. The authors thus conclude that the impression that most academics are concerned about Wikipedia's quality is not proven by their data. Nonetheless, the artifacts of Wikipedia early poor reception within academia linger: more than half of the respondents think that use of Wikipedia is frowned up by most academics, even through only 14% do so.

The study goes beyond presenting simple descriptive statistics, and gives us a number of interesting findings based on correlations: strongest correlation for teaching use is related to making edits (r=.59), followed by opinions that it improves students learning (r=.47), perception of and use by colleagues (r=.41), Wikipedia's perceived quality (r=.4) and its passive use (r=.3). The authors also find that views of and use of Wikipedia's is higher among the STEM fields than in the "soft", social sciences. This also explains the Wikipedia's higher popularity among male instructors (which disappears when controlled for discipline and the corresponding much lower population of women teaching in the STEM fields). Interestingly, the influence of age was not found to be significant, which the authors concluding that "that faculty’s decision to use Wikipedia in learning processes does not follow the usual pattern of other Web 2.0 tools where young people tend to be more frequent users."

Of immediate practical value to the Wikipedia community are the findings on what would help the respondents design educational activities using Wikipedia: 64% would like to see a "catalog presenting best practices", with similar numbers (about 50%) pointing to "getting greater institutional recognition", "having colleagues explaining their own experiences", and "receiving specific training".

Wikipedia assignments at Finnish secondary schools

A conference paper titled "Guiding Students in Collaborative Writing of Wikipedia Articles – How to Get Beyond the Black Box Practice in Information Literacy Instruction"' (already briefly mentioned in our October issue) reports on the use of a Wikipedia student assignments in a somewhat different environment than the usual American undergraduates - instead, this one deals with Finish secondary school students. The authors use the guided inquiry framework, one that postulates that "information literacies are best learned by training appropriate information practices in a genuine collaborative process of inquiry", and that asks how collaborative Wikipedia writing assignments fit into this approach. The authors findings tie with the prior research on this subject: students are found to be more motivated than in traditional writing assignments, they develop skills in understanding wikis and Wikipedia (jncluding its reliablity) and in encyclopedic writing. They are however less likely to develop skills such as identifying reliable sources without additional instructions on this. The authors also note that "the limitation of encyclopaedic writing is that it is not intended to generate new knowledge but to synthesize knowledge from existing sources(i.e., a type of literature review)"; hence teachers who aim to develop skills in generating new knowledge have to consider alternative assignments. The author also stress the need to tailor the Wikipedia assignment (or any other) to the specific class.

Briefly

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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.

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References

Supplementary references and notes:

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• The Pulmonary Medicine review is informative and, to my layman mind, persuasive that the "study" in question is misguided. Or, to use more words less precisely, a bungled hatchet job. However, the point about accuracy stuck in my mind as possibly valid. Did the chosen WP articles actually say many things that are not true? That's my impression of what "inaccurate" ought to mean. Or rather, did they say things that are contrary to conventional opinion among practitioners in the relevant field? Or is "accurate" defined according to other criteria? Jim.henderson (talk) 21:25, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Jim. Thank you for reading my review, and for your insightful questions.

The paper's author claims to use the modified DISCERN tool to assess accuracy. Yet most of the DISCERN questions are unrelated to accuracy. As far as I can tell, the researchers assigned a score between 1 (serious/extensive shortcomings) and 5 (minimal shortcomings) for each article's accuracy. This was determined by comparing the articles to medical textbooks. The lowest rated article was "(Nail) clubbing". As far as I can tell, the accuracy of the article looks just fine.

This paper (and other assessments of Wikipedia's medical content) seem to have a tacit assumption that the researchers know how to assess these articles. Unfortunately this is not the case. Axl ¤ [Talk] 20:40, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Wild. Seems like the most obfuscatory depths of, say, social science. The author says he's checking whether Wikipedia is a good tool for learning, but apparently is only interested in whether it can substitute adequately for a textbook. Well, duh! I worked 41 years as a telephone switching technician. Becoming good at it required attentive time in classrooms. Also reading a bunch of books, journals and other things. And seeking guidance from old practitioners. Were someone to ask today how to become a good technician, I would answer, do as I did, and since we've got Wikipedia, use that, too. But as a substitute? What? Who would expect to need statistical analysis to put down that idea? We're not trying to write a textbook, or a series of textbooks, for practitioners. We're trying to write an encyclopedia so, for example, doctors can learn something about how telephones connect to each other, or engineers can get a rough idea of the main ways lungs get sick. When we fail at that, as we often do, we should be knocked for it. Not when a switching technician remains clueless after trying to use Wikipedia to set a NT6X18A line card for Ground start. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:34, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

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