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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tbayer (WMF) (talk | contribs) at 15:14, 10 January 2013 (→Multiple watchlists). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Welcome to Wikipedia!!!

Hello Tbayer (WMF)/Archive 2011-2014! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. If you decide that you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Below are some recommended guidelines to facilitate your involvement. Happy Editing! Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 23:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Getting Started
Getting your info out there
Getting more Wikipedia rules
Getting help
Getting along
Getting technical

I appreciate WMF taking a stance. Has the censored version of the logo been uploaded to Commons? I think it would be a great image to use in some of our articles on related issues. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 23:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, it actually doesn't exist as a standalone image – it is an effect created by superimposing a black rectangle ('style="width:140px;height:60px;... ;background-color:#000;') containing a local copy of [1] over [2] (= the site logo of blog.wikimedia.org). Hope that helps in generating a reproduction. Note that the original logo is trademarked and not under a free license.
Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 17 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"other-focused"

That's awkward, I think, even if the authors did use it. I'm trying to think of something idiomatic. "outwardly focused" isn't quite it. I can't find an antonym for "self". Tony (talk) 14:48, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's quite hard to summarize the (a) main result of that paper in the brevity required for the subtitle. As "other-focused" seems to be an established term and at least hints at its meaning in a somewhat intriguing way, I have now re-included in a different form, until someone comes up with a better option. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 27 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever transpired, it's not included in the subtitle, which is good. Could I take this opportunity to put in a plea that you use en dashes – as sentence-level breaks – rather than - fly-spot - hyphens? This has been an issue for some time. Dashes are required, for proper writing, by all major style guides, including CMOS, Oxford, and WP's MoS. You can access them under the edit-box or by running the dash script (single button-push). The latter can be easily accessed by adding a phrase on your vector.js page. I've had to run it three times on the research article in The Signpost after your additions, which looked bad and were inconsistent with the rest of the page and other Signpost pages. It would be nice to know you have ready access to them. Thanks. Tony (talk) 06:38, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unpublished research

Hi, does ElKevbo have a point? I see that the pdf file says, inter alia, "Under review—do not cite." and "Submitted for confidential review. November 2011". Apart from other concerns, this coverage might be seen to put pressure on the peer reviewers. Tony (talk) 12:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See my reply here - basically, this was a conscious decision (reviewing/summarizing is not citing, and I don't see how review processes could be hurt by a discussion about new research results involving informed community members). Now that an extended version of this paper has been published among the WikiSym conference proceedings, we might cover it again. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia research

I wish I had more time right now, I am somewhat busy today. But here are short summaries of:

  • [3]: provides an analysis of factors related to one's participation (or lack of thereof) in the Request for Adminship discussions. It confirms previous findings that many participants are drawn due to their personal contacts and experiences with others. The paper tries to analyze the impact of direct past interaction versus homophily (roughly defiend as shared interests). The findings suggest that homophily plays a much smaller role compared to past interactions. Overall, it appears that administrators are often elected (or voted against...) not by the community at large, but by a group of their closest peers. To quote from the conclusion of the paper: "This raises questions about the robustness of Wikipedia’s administrator selection process which is then comprised of a very small interaction-selected group of editors."
  • [4]: this study tests if Wikipedia is truly neutral, by measuring bias (slant) within a sample of 28 thousand entries about US political topics, examined over a decade. The bias is identified through the use of language specific to one side of the US political scene (Democrats or Republicans). To quote from the article: "In brief, we ask whether a given Wikipedia article uses phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress.". The authors identified, as of January 2011, 70,668 articles related to US politics, about 40% of which had a statistically significant bias. They find that Wikipedia articles are often biased upon creation, and that this bias rarely changes. Early on in Wikipedia history, most had a pro-Democratic bias, and while modern Wikipedia is has a more even distribution of articles, this is simply an effect of a larger amount of new pro-Republican articles than due to any NPOV-inv of the existing ones.
  • [5]: This paper looks at the language used by Wikipedia editors. The authors look at how conversational language can be used to understand power relationship. The research analyzes how much one adapts their language to the language of others involved in the discussion (the process of language coordination). The finding indicate that the more such adoption occurs, the more deferential one is. The authors find that editors on Wikipedia tend to coordinate (language-wise) more with the admins than with non-admins. Further, the study suggests that one's ability to coordinate the language has the impact on one's changes to become an admin: the admin-candidates who do more language coordination have a higher chance of becoming an admin than those who don't change their language. Once a person is elected an admin, they tend to coordinate less.
  • more coming if I have the time, will post them here that about covers my field of expertise (social sciences). Feel free to hit me up next month, I do enjoy reading that stuff, and wouldn't mind helping with it more often. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 16:42, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Signpost barnstar

The Signpost Barnstar
For your thoroughness in the January 30, 2012 Signpost Recent Research report. Pinetalk 08:21, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Wikimedia Research Newsletter

I'll try to help and review social science papers again! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 19:31, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As previously, I am posting my entries here. Let me know if you'd like me to add them directly to Signpost instead in the future. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 21:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • [6]: A master thesis by Dušan Miletić on Europe According to English Wikipedia: Open-sourcing the Discourse on Europe looks at the nature of the discourse on Europe in English Wikipedia, employing the Foucauldian discourse analysis approach, which focuses on analyzing the power in relationships as expressed through language. The article notes that "changes to the statements defining what Europe is, which hold the cardinal role in the discourse, had much more significance than others." In other words, the editors who succeeded in changing the definition of Europe were subsequently able to have their points of view better represented in the reminder of the article. Another finding suggests that definition of European culture was much more difficult to arrive at, and spawned many more revisions throughout the article, than the discussion of geography of Europe. Another aspect discussed in the article is the blurry boundary between Europe and European Union. The article concludes that the borders of European culture are note the same as the borders of geographical Europe, and hence, the difficult task of defining Europe, and revising the Wikipedia article, is bound to continue.
  • [7]: This paper focuses on the first contribution, looking at it as an indicator for the future level of involvement in the project. After having discovered Wikipedia, the sooner one makes their first edit, the higher the likelihood they'll keep editing. Reasons for the first edit matter, as those who just want to see how a wiki (Wikipedia) works are less likely to keep editing than those who want to share (improve) something specific, content-wise. Making a minor edit is much less likely to result in a highly active editor; those who will become very active are often those whose very first edit required a large investment of time. As the authors note, "it seems that those who will become the core editors of the community have a clearly defined purpose since the beginning of their participation and don’t waste their time with minor improvements on existing article". Finally, the authors find that having a real life contact who shows one how to edit a Wikipedia is much more likely to result in that person becoming a regular Wikipedia contributor, compared to people who learn how to edit by themselves.
Thanks! I added them, but indeed feel free to do so yourself. Good job on extracting the actual findings from the Europe thesis in an intelligible way - this one had me a bit puzzled when browsing through it for a few minutes yesterday. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thesis can be like that, they don't have to be concise like papers. Not that it helps some papers much... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 21:52, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • [8]: looked interesting, but this is work in progress, no findings, so I suggest we drop it
  • [9]: have you looked into it? Seems interesting, but the abstract is jargon heavy and poorly written, suggesting this can be a PITA to read through :> Update: I tried reading through, the paper is as bad as I thought. Their conclusion is basically their abstract. The only thing I can make out is the one plain text about using Wikipedia to popularize research (doh!). I think this may be a conference paper, because if this was actually published in peer review, ouch. Perhaps it makes more sense to somebody with a different background, though.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 21:57, 22 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping.

  • [10]: looks at how Wikipedia editors talked about the NPOV policy in the period of July 2005 to January 29, 2006, using Karl Weick's model of sensemaking and Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration for its theoretical approach. The paper focus was on "how individual sensemaking efforts turn into interacts"; in other words, trying to understand how editors came to understand the NPOV policy through their posts. Editor posts were differentiated into three types of questions (Asking clarification question, asking about behavior and the rules, questions as a rhetorical technique) and answers (offering interpretation, explanation to others, explanation to oneself). [frankly, I am struggling at saying anything about the comclusion of this paper; it seems very descriptive and its conclusion is that "the theories used can be used to describe interactions on Wikipedia". Abstract makes certain claims that I am not seeing in the conclusion, or detailed anywhere in the body; perhaps you'll be able to get something more useful from it. The last para before conclusions seems to have an interesting claim about tensions, but it is not clear what data supports it other than author's subjective interpretation]
  • [11]: The researchers looked at a sample of over 400 students who were involved in the WMF education initiative (87% of whom where native speakers of English), and asked how likely are the student-editors to be become real editors after the class project ends, and what are the relevant factors. They find that the student retention ratio is higher than the average editor retention ratio (while only 0.0002% of editors who make one edit becoming regulars, about 4% have made edits after the course ended). About 75% of the students preferred the Wikipedia assignment to a regular one, and major reasons for their enjoyment included level of engagement in class, appreciation of global visibility of the article, and exposure to social media.

--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 17:56, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great, adding it. The research newsletter is open to reviews as well as summaries, so you should feel free to include some of your own informed opinion, e.g. a remark like "It is not clear to this reviewer which data supports the conclusion". Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Since we are publishing it as a collborative piece, I thought you may want to take a second look at this, before we post something more critical like that. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 20:42, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Normally I would be happy to (like with the paper on US political bias last time), but right now I'm running out of time (btw, help is still welcome in adding brief mentions of the >10 items that are not yet covered). But I agree that a second pair of eyes can be useful in that situation and you're welcome to ping me again next time in such a case. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Also, on the subject of teaching with Wikipedia, this seems relevant, so I suggest we add it:

  • "Writing Wikipedia Articles as a Classroom Assignment," essay for Teaching Sociology Section Newsletter, February 2012 page (pdf): As part of the American Sociological Association Wikipeda Initiative, Erik Olin Wright, president of ASA, posted an overview of a teaching with Wikipedia assignment he taught in a graduate seminar. The students had to review a book, and use their newly gained knowledge to expand a relevant article on Wikipedia. In his assessment, Wright calling the activity a "great success" and encouraged others to engage in similar activities.

--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 19:11, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's a great find and should definitely appear in this Signpost issue. I'm a bit ambiguous on whether it belongs in the research newsletter or in the "In the news" section - on the one hand it is not really a research paper per se, on the other hand it is of course relevant to the academic community. What do you think? Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hard to say, but I thought we could put it next to the other teaching piece? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 20:42, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
OK, as a side remark it could actually work. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I am back now and I'll try to review at least the one you've pointed out shortly. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 17:06, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've expanded that review based on my own impressions. I've also read:
  • [12], which has a very nice abstracts summarizing the important findings and conclusions
  • [13]: this is a draft (working paper) of a very interesting article, with a promise of a major milestone in Wikipedia research. This paper is an attempt to synthesize a broad-based literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. The authors intend to release their findings in a "Web 2.0" format through their wiki website at http://wikilit.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page , by the end of May, 2012. The current paper is impressive in scope, but (at 71 pages) badly in need of a table of content (the current version does not seem to adhere to any consistent manual of style, with headings using different font sizes and even colors) and clarifications (the current distinction between findings on p.12 and discussion on p. 19 seems somewhat arbitrary;, the authors at one point promise a discussion of over 2,000 articles and in other talk of the sample of 139). Keeping in mind this is just a draft paper, we hope the final paper will have an improve flow and transparency. In either case, the presented methodology is useful for those interested in learning how to analyze large, thematic bodies of work using online databases. The authors in one of their major contributions intend to present an overview of Wikipedia research grouped by theme (keywords), such as for example discussing research done on "Vandalism reversion", "Thesaurus construction" or "Attitude towards Wikipedia"; while the current draft may not be yet comprehensive, it shows much potential, through in practice their wiki website, which already groups the content with categories, may prove more useful as a reference work. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 19:40, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Great, thanks! BTW, did you check how it relates to this previous working paper by one of the authors?
I was actually just in the process of summarizing [14] myself, as noted on the Etherpad - it's useful to check it so as to avoid duplicate work. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 26 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's reasearch for 30 April 2012 edition

Ok, I am done with my newest Wikipedia's article, so here are some reviews of works that I found interesting.

  • Lu Xiao, Nicole Askin, (2012) "Wikipedia for Academic Publishing: Advantages and Challenges", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 Iss: 3: This paper looks at whether academic papers could be published on Wikipedia. It compares the publishing process on Wikipedia to that of an open access journal. The authors conclude that Wikipedia's model of publishing research seems superior to that of an open access journal, particularly in the areas of publicity, cost and timeliness. It notes that the biggest challenges for academic contributions to Wikipedia revolve around acceptance of Wikipedia in academia, poor integration with academic databases, and the technical and conceptual differences between an academic article and an encyclopedic one. Unfortunately, the paper suffers from several problems. It correctly identifies that the closed a Wikipedia article comes to a "final", fully peer-reviewed status is after having passesed the Featured Article Candidates process, but it makes no mention of some intermediary steps in Wikipedia's assessment project, such as the B-class, Good Article or A-class reviews, nor is the the assessment project itself mentioned. Despite it focus on the Featured Article process, no other previous academic work on Featured Articles is cited (despite quite a few having been published). Perhaps most crucially, it also ignores the most relevant of Wikipedia's policies, the Wikipedia:No original research, which is not mentioned even once in the article; the entire article fails to consider the question of whether the Wikipedia would want to publish academic articles without them undergoing some changes to bring them closer to the encyclopedic style - a topic that already has become an issue numerous times, in particular, with regards to difficulties encountered by some educational projects. In the end, the paper is, while a well-intended piece, seems to illustrate the still significant gap in academia's understanding of what Wikipedia is.
  • [15]: This article concerns the issue of citations of Wikipedia in law reviews and the appropriateness of this practice. The article seems to be well researched, and the author demonstrates familiarity with mechanic of Wikipedia (such as the permanent links). Baker identifies that in the period of 2002-2008, 15400 law review articles have cited Wikipedia. Most of the citations were found in the law reviews dealing with general and "popular" subject matter, and a significant proportion of the citations originated from authors with academic credentials. It notes that year 2006 marked the peak of that trend, attributing it (and demonstrating a reasonable knoweldge of Wikipedia's history) to a delayed reaction to the Seigenthaler incident and Essjay Controversy (as the article ends data analysis in 2008, the question of did this trend rebound in the recent years is unfortunately left unanswered). The author is highly critical of Wikipedia's reliability, arguing that a source that "anyone can edit", and where much of the information is not verified, should not be used in works that may influence legal decisions. Thus Baker calls for stricter rules in legal publishing, rejecting citations to Wikipedia. In a more surprising argument, the paper also suggests that if information exists on Wikipedia, it should be treated as common knowledge, and thus does not require referencing (this recommendation follows a 2009 one - Brett Deforest Maxfield, Ethics, Politics and Securities Law: How Unethical People Are Using Politics to Undermine the Integrity of Our Courts and Financial Markets, 35 OHIO N.U. L. REV. 243, 293 (2009). This latter argument does however rise the question of whether no citation at all is truly better than a citation to Wikipedia - after all, if such a recommendation is followed, it could lead to a proliferation of uncited claims in law review journals that would be assumed (without any verification) to rely on "common knowledge" as represented in the "do not cite" Wikipedia.
    • I'd appreciate if you could look at p. 38, perhaps I am misunderstanding the claim based om the Maxfield ref?
I am not sure, but two quick points:
  • In the closely related area of Wikipedia as a court source, there is the notion that citing Wikipedia is sometimes acceptable in relation to judicial notice, see e.g. [16].
  • A fuller quote from Maxfield's article which should help to assess this: "In my view, if there is an article written about the thing you want to talk about on Wikipedia, then it qualifies as common knowledge among educated people on the whole and is unworthy of reference in a footnote. For example famous people, books, philosophies, historical events and movements, etc. are well established in the collective knowledge of educated people and one should be able to talk and one should be able to talk about them freely without fear that they have lost their reader due to having knowledge that others do not possess. Before the internet, a scholar was obliged to give their reader a way to access information discussed in a paper and could not assume much about what the collective intelligence of literate people amounted to, i.e. whether it included a particular idea, person, book, etc. or not. Now there is a simple way to check."
Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:56, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • [17]: simply and shortly, referencing of Wikipedia in academic works is continuing unabated. Interestingly, Scholarpedia is showing itself to be the second most popular online encyclopedia to be cited, if lagging significantly behind Wikiepdia (5%).

Invitation for AdminConvention

Moin Tbayer please take a look at this edit. Cheers Sargoth (talk) 22:44, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The workshop was cancelled, thanks for your attention. Sargoth (talk) 09:05, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Teamwork Barnstar
to all of the contributors to the April 30, 2012 Recent Research report in the Signpost for the good work there! Pine(talk) 07:51, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's reasearch for 29 May 2012 edition

[18]: This article looks at interactions between Wikipedia editors, and the project's governance, visible in the articles on stem cells and transhumanism, and in the analysis of Wikipedia's discussion of userboxes through the prism of Jürgen Habermas universal pragmatics and Mikhail Bakhtin dialogism theories. The authors use those theories, focusing on the qualitative analysis of language used by editors, to argue that Wikipedia has elements of a democracy, and is an example of a Web 2.0 empowering (emancipating) discourse tool. They authors stress that some forms of discourse found online (and on Wikipedia) may be highly irrational, something that some previous arguments for Web 2.0 being a democratic space have often ignored, but they argue that this is in fact not as much of a hindrance as previously expected. The authors remark that on Wikipedians, discourse can develop between editors of widely differing points of view, and that some Wikipedians will engage in "repeated, strategic, and often highly manipulative attempts" to assert personal authority. Such discussions may be very lively, with "that personal, emotional, or humour-based arguments", yet the authors argue that such comments may not be a hindrance; instead, "on many occasions, there is thus a clearer exposition of views that is achieved, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these personal/sometimes vulgar methods of argumentation." In the end, the authors positively comment of the success of Wikipedia's deliberation in reaching consensus, albeit they remark that it can be "fleeting and transitory" on occasion. Unfortunately, the paper does not touch upon the existence of Wikipedia policies such as Wikipedia:Civility and Wikipedia:No personal attacks, which would certainly add to the analysis presented.

On a side note, despite the paper's claim to have received an approval for research through a "University Research Ethics Committee", the fact that the paper discusses, in occasionally critical fashion (example: "[Editor A] claim to authority and ad hominem attacks were met with derision by [Editor B]" (editor names have been replaced by anonymous pseudonyms by me), the editing of specific editors, may raise some eyebrows. As we all know, not all editors are 100% anonymous, and even those who who are have vested reputation in their identities. This raises a question if this paper has done enough to protect the identity and reputation of the editors it cites; at the very least, why weren't the editors usernames changed in the quotes? Their direct identification adds nothing to the article (what is important for the author's argument is the quote itself, not who said it), but makes it easier for others to use the paper in attacking them back.

Regarding WMC, perhaps we should link meta:Notes_on_good_practices_on_Wikipedia_research#Anonymised_re_pseudonymised. Also, I found time to review [19]. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me 16:26, 29 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • The paper looks at how leaders emerge in Wikipedia and similar crowd-based organizations. While often seen as egalitarian and with little hierarchy, such projects always have a group of leaders who have emerged from the community (the "crowd"), involved in long-term planning, mediation, and policy development. The authors treat Wikipedia and similar organization as a core-periphery network model developed by Steve Borgatti - a system with a deeply interconnected center, and a poorly connected periphery. In Wikipedia, the leaders are the most active contributors, and the authors assume they produce the most social capital. Using social network analysis, the paper looks at the interpersonal ties between the editors, with focus on the ties to the leaders and the periphery, hypothesizing that specific types of ties will have a greater influence on advancement to leadership.

The authors collected data from Wikipedia:Request for adminship pages, and tte ties were measured through user talk interaction; core members/leaders were defined as administrators, and periphery editors as non-administrators (this operationalization may raise some doubts about the validity, as there are some very active and prominent members of the community who are not administrators, something that the authors do not address). The authors find that important ties are the early ties to the periphery, and later, ties to the leaders. They also find that overall strong ties are not as important as weak ties, althouth Simmelian ties (two leader groups) are among the most important. The authors conclude that leaders in projects like Wikipedia do not suddenly appear, instead, they evolve over time through their immersion in the project's social network. Early in their experience, those leaders get a deeper understanding of the community, and developing a network of contacts, through their connections (weak ties) on the periphery, and later, to the leaders, particularly in the form of strong connection to a leader group.

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Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's reasearch for 26 June 2012 edition

For [20]/[21]. The authors develop an interesting "measure of controversiality", something that might be of interest to editors at large if it was a more widely popularized and dynamically updated statistic. They look at the patterns of conflicts (edit warring) on Wikipedia articles. The authors find that edit warriors usually are prone to reaching consensus, and the rare cases of articles with never-ending warring involve those that continously attract new editors, who have not yet joined the consensus.

Regarding methodology, the authors decision to filter out articles with under 100 edits as "evidently conflict-free" is a bit problematic, as there are articles with few than 100 edits that have been subject to clear if not overly long edit warring (a recent example: Concerns and controversies related to UEFA Euro 2012). One could also wish that the discussion of the "memory effects", a term mentioned only in the abstract and lead, which the author suggests is significant to understanding of the conflict dynamic, was given more explanation somewhere in the article (the term "memory" itself appears four times in the body and does not seem to be operationalized anywhere). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:16, 25 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Res Rep

Hi, I've just edited it, trying to fix an edit-conflict. I hope I didn't miss anything.

In my view, the piece is way too long for the Signpost genre. I wonder whether it needs to be fortnightly, in more digestible chunks. Tony (talk) 03:43, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's reasearch for 27 August 2012 edition

Two Wikipedia papers were presented during the American Sociological Association conference last week, both focusing on awards. Michael Restivo and Arnout van de Rijt presented "Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production" (absract: We test the effects of informal rewards in peer production. Using a randomized, experimental design, we assigned editing awards or “barnstars” to a subset of the 1% most productive Wikipedia contributors. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members, revealing that informal rewards significantly impact individual effort.) and Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw, and Yochai Benkler presented Status, Social Signaling, and Collective Action: A Field Study of Awards on Wikipedia (abstract: Research into collective action and the provision of public goods has primarily focused on selective incentives as solutions to free rider problems and the tragedy of the commons. By suggesting that groups can reward individual contribution to public gods with increased status, Willer has argued for a sociological mechanism for the provision of public goods through selective incentives. Willer posits a "virtuous circle" where contributors are rewarded with status by other group members and, in response, are motivated to contribute more. This "status theory of collective action" extends findings from earlier studies of awards, which have suggested that awards are an important mechanism for driving contribution. That said, many contributions to real public goods are made anonymously; and there is reason to suspect that not all individuals will be equally susceptible to status-based awards or incentives. At the very least, Willer's theory fails to take into account individual differences in the desire to signal contributions to a public good. We test whether this omission is justified and whether individuals who do not signal status in the context of collective action behave differently from those who do in the presence of a reputation-based award. We analyze evidence from a real field setting using peer-to-peer awards called "barnstars" given in Wikipedia. We show that the social signalers see a boost in their editing behavior where non-signalers do not. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings for theories of collective action.) IIRC both groups told me that their papers have been already presented before and covered by Signpost, so we can probably link this past coverage.

Assigning Students to edit Wikipedia: Four Case Studies (Carver et al.): This article presents a case study of experiences of four professors’ who participated in the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Education Program; 6 courses total (two of four instructors taught two classes each). (We could probably find and link the specific ones? They are not anonymous in the article) Important lessons from the assignments included: 1) the importance of strict deadlines, even for graduate classes; 2) having a dedicated class to editing and policies of Wikipedia, or spreading this over segments of several classes; 3) benefits from having students interact with the Campus Ambassadors and the wider Wikipedia community. Overall, the instructors saw that the student were more highly motivated than in traditional assignments, produced work of higher quality than in traditional assignments, and learned more skills (primarily, related to using Wikipedia, such as being able to judge its reliability better). Wikipedia itself benefited from several dozens created or improved articles, a number of which were featured as Did You Knows. The paper thus presents a useful addition to the emerging literature on teaching with Wikipedia, being one of the first serious and detailed discussions of specific cases of this new educational approach.

Will try to review more tomorrow. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 16:25, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I added the education program item.
Great to have coverage of the ASA annual meeting! The paper by Restivo / van de Rijt was covered in the April issue; I'm not sure the one by Mako/Aaron/Benkler was mentioned before. While the abstracts are informative, I'm a bit reluctant to quote them in full; are they available online?
Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 12:34, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I thought they all were online and covered. How about we ask Mako about this, he contributes to the newsletter too, right? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:11, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I couldn't find the abstract texts when googling some passages, but perhaps one just needs to dig a little deeper into the ASAnet website.
Yes, Mako contributed last time and has promised to do so this time too. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia: Remembering in the digital age is a master thesis by Simin Michelle Chen. Her works theme is collective memories as represented on Wikipedia; she examins how significant events are portrayed (remembered) on this project, focuses on the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. She compares how this event was framed by the articles by New York Times and Xinhua News Agency, and on Wikipedia, where she focuses on the content analysis of Talk:Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and its archives. Chen finds that the way Wikipedia frames the event is much closer to that of the New York Times than that of the sources preferred by the Chinese government, which, she notes, were "not given an equal voice" (p. 152). She later notes that this (English Wikipedia) article is of major importance to China, but it is not easily influenced by Chinese people, due language barriers, and discrimination against Chinese sources perceived by the Wikipedia community of editors as often unreliable (more subject to censorship and other forms of government manipulation than the Western sources). She notes that this leads to on-Wiki conflicts between contributors with different points of views (she refers to them as "memories" through her work), and usually the contributors who support that Chinese government POV are "silenced" (p. 152). This leads her to conclude that different memories (POVs) are attributed different weights on Wikipedia. While this finding is not revolutionary, her case study up to this point is a valuable contribution to the discussion of Wikipedia biases.

While Chen makes interesting points about the existence of different national biases, which impact editors very frames of reference, and different treatment of various sources, her subsequent critique of Wikipedia's NPOV policy is likely to raise some eyebrows (see also p. 48-50). She argues that NPOV is flawed because "it is based on the assumption that facts are irrefutable" (p.154), but those facts are based on different memories and cultural viewpoints, and thus should be treated equally, instead of some (Western) being given preference. Subsequently, she concludes that Wikipedia contributes to "the broader structures of dominance and Western hegemony in the production of knowledge" (p. 161). While she acknowledges that official Chinese sources may be biased and censored, she does not discuss this in much detail, and instead seems to be arguing that the biases affecting those sources are comparable to the biases affecting Western sources. In other words, she is saying that while some claim Chinese sources are biased, other claim that Western sources are biased, and because English Wikipedia is dominated by the Western editors their bias triumphs - whereas ideally, all sources should be allowed in order to reduce the bias. Therefore, she seems to suggest Wikipedia, in order to reduce the Western bias she perceives, should reject NPOV and accept sources currently deemed as unreliable. Her argument about the English Wikipedia having a Western bias is not very controversial, was discussed by the community before (although Chen does not seem to be aware of it, and does not use the term "systemic bias" in her thesis at all) and reducing this bias (by improving our coverage of non-Western topics) is even one of the Wikimedia Foundation goals. However, while she does not say so directly, it appears to this reviewer that her argument is: "if there are no reliable non-Western sources, we should use the unreliable ones, as this is the only way to reduce the Western bias affecting non-Western topics". Her ending comment that Wikipedia fails to leave to its potential and to deliver "postmodern approach to truth" brings to mind the community discussions about verifiability not truth (the existence of this debates she briefly acknowledges on p. 48).

Overall, Chen's discussion of biases affecting Wikipedia in general, and of Tiananmen Square Protests in particular, is certainly valuable. The thesis however suffers, in this reviewer's opinion, from two major flaws. First, the discussion of Wikipedia's policies such as reliable sources and verifiability (not truth...) seems too short, considering that their critique forms a major part of her conclusions. Second, the argumentation and accompanying value judgements that Wikipedia should stop discriminating against certain memories (POVs) seems not very convincing. Consequently, the thesis seems to spend too much time criticizing Wikipedia for its Western bias, setting it up as a major problem overshadowing all others on Wikipedia, without properly explaining the reasons for why did the Wikipedia community made those decisions (favoring verifiability and reliable sources over inclusion of all viewpoints), and without properly delving into the rich history of those debates on Wikipedia. Chen argues that Wikipedia sacrifices freedom and discriminates against some memories (contributors), which she seems to see as more of a problem that if Wikipedia was to accept unreliable sources and unverifiable claims. Therefore while she correctly points out Wikipedia is affected by a systemic (pro-Western) bias, her argument that Wikipedia should abandon its insistence of the use of reliable and verifiable sources, in order to reduce the said bias, seems much less well argued.

--

I hope this is not too much if a critique. Feel free to tone it down. I liked parts of the paper, but particularly in her conclusion, I really got rather annoyed. It's too much like an essay-rant by somebody who does not like NPOV. Btw, if you can find a link to WMF blog or site or such to back up the fact that countering systemic bias is "one of the Wikimedia Foundation goals" as I write above, it would be nice. I'd assume that others at WMF could help with finding the best source? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:15, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I might edit it a little, but in principle I think assessments such as these do have a place in a review. I think it would be great though if the review placed a little more emphasis on informing the reader about the actual methodology used. I seem to recall she analyzed the contents of Talk:Tiananmen Square protests of 1989?
Regarding systemic bias, perhaps you meant the following from the 2010-15 strategic plan?: "Encourage diversity by conducting outreach among groups that have the potential to bring new expertise to the projects, as well as by supporting leaders from underrepresented groups in their efforts to cultivate new members from within their communities.
"
Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Good link, and yes, she seems to have done content analysis of the said talk page. I've added a sentence to that extent to my review above. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:58, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--

Now, on to [22]. The main argument of this paper, wich the authors call the "Low-Hanging Fruit hypothesis", is as follows: "that the larger the site becomes, and the more knowledge it contains, the more difficult it becomes for editors to make novel, lasting contributions. That is, all of the easy articles have already been created, leaving only more difficult topics to write about". The authors break this hypothesis into three smaller ones, more easy to test: (1) a slowdown in edits is observed across many languages with diverse characteristics; (2) articles created earlier are more popular to edit; and (3) articles created earlier are more popular to view. They find a support for all three of the smaller hypotheses, which they use to argue supports their main Low-Hanging Fruit hypothesis. While the study seems well designed with regards to the study of the three child hypothesis, the extrapolation from them to the parent one seems problematic. The authors do not provide a proper operationalization of the terms like "novel", "lasting", "easy/difficult", making it difficult to enter into a discourse without risking miscommunication. This reviewer would point out to the following issues:

  • (a minor but annoying issue): hypothesis II in incorrectly and confusingly worded in the section dedicated to it: "Older articles (those created earlier) will be more popular to read than more newly created articles" but their study of this hypothesis (no II) is based on the number of edits to the article, not the number of page views (those are analyzed in the subsequent hypothesis no III);
  • regarding the claim "all of the easy articles have already been created, leaving only more difficult topics to write about". It is true that majority of vital/core articles are developed beyond stub, and their subsequent expansion is more difficult (it takes more and more effort to move the article up through assessment classes). However, while the older articles are more popular, they are not necessarily easier to edit, as Wikipedia:The Core Contest illustrates. While mostly everyone may be able to quickly define (stub) Albert Einstein, it is questionable whether 1) developing this article is easier than developing an article on a less known subject, where fewer sources mean the editors need to do less research and 2) while mostly everyone knows who Einstein was, everyone also has knowledge of less popular subjects. As Wikipedia:Missing articles illustrate, there is still a lot of articles in need of creation, and for a fan/expert, it may be easier to create an article on an esoteric subject they care about than on Einstein. Thus the author assumption that those older articles are easier to edit seems rather fallacious.
  • regarding the claim "[it is more difficult] for editors to make novel, lasting contributions". Analyzing this is really difficult due to the lack of operationalization of those terms by the authors, but 1) regarding novel, if it means new, see the Missing articles argument above - there is still plenty to write about; and 2) regarding lasting - the authors do not cite any sources suggesting the deletionism in English Wikipedia may be on the rise.

Overall, the paper presents four hypothesis, three of which seem to be well supported by data, and contribute to our understanding of Wikipedia, but their main claim seems rather controversial and poorly supported by their data and argumentation.

Hmmm, I guess it's another critique. Sorry, I'll try to find something I like next time :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:55, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • [23] is a master thesis that looks at how high school, college and PhD students judge the trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles, based on the "3S-model" model by Lucassen and Schraagen (2011), Factual Accuracy and Trust in Information: The Role of Expertise. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 62, 1232–1242. Unsurprisingly, the more educated the group is, the more detailed their analysis will be. High school students usually focus on accuracy, completeness, images, length, and writing style. College and PhD students go beyond those five elements, although looking at authority, objectivity, and structure. Interestingly, the differences between college and PhD students were much smaller than those between high school students and the other two groups. Another important finding of the study was that the less educated the group, the less likely they are to be aware of Wikipedia being open source and open to editing by anyone. Further, high school students seem to have much more difficulty in distinguishing between a high and low quality article, and overall, seem much more likely to simply not question the trustworthiness of the sources given.

Couldn't really find much more to write about this. Really short for a MT... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 21:16, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

[24] This is yet another paper discussing the experiences of some instructors and student involved in the recent Wikipedia:Global Education Program. Like most of the existing research, the paper is roughly positive in its description of this new educational approach, stressing the importance of deadlines, small introductory assignments familiarizing students with Wikipedia early on in the course, and the importance of good interactions with the community. A poorly justified (or not explained) deletion or removal of content can be quite a stressful experience to students (and the newbie editors are unlikely to realize an explanation may be left in an edit summary or page deletion log). A valuable suggestion in the paper encouraged the instructors (professors) to make edits themselves, so they would be able to discuss editing Wikipedia with students with some first-hand experience, instead of directing students to ambassadors and how-to manuals; and to dedicate some class time to discussing Wikipedia, the assignment, and collective editing. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 21:36, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

All added to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-27/Recent research. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Recent Research suggestion

I suggest including the information about courts citing Wikipedia described in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-20/In the news. Pine✉ 09:07, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the hint! It doesn't seem to fall strictly into the scope of the research report, as this was about a court decision (rather than a law journal article such as the 2010 listed here), but if you want to write a short (1-2 sentences) mention for the "Briefly" section, go ahead. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Recent Research

Question, in the section:

"(a minor but annoying issue): hypothesis II in incorrectly and confusingly worded in the section dedicated to it: "Older articles (those created earlier) will be more popular to read than more newly created articles" but their study of this hypothesis (no II) is based on the number of edits to the article, not the number of page views (those are analyzed in the subsequent hypothesis no III);"

Is "no" (as in "no III") an abbreviation for number or is it saying 'there is no section III'? If it is an abbreviation for number could it be clarified either by changing to a different notation ( #, number, or such) or putting a period after it to form "no." so it looks like an abbreviation rather than a word? Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 14:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus wrote that text (as stated in the edit summary), so one would need to ask him to be sure, but I think the "no"s are meant as abbreviations of "number". Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

RR

Hi Tilman, you have a bit of extra time to finish this, as we're pushing back publishing while we wait to hear back from interviewees. Can you have it ready by 18:00 UTC? Thanks very much (as always!), Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 05:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the notice! Dario and I are indeed in scramble mode right now to finish it off, but that extra time will be useful. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:13, 28 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Low-hanging fruit paper

Thanks for the heads up, although I don't have anything to say to the author right now (as he also does not seem to pose a specific question to me/us). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 16:45, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree it doesn't necessarily require a reply; just wanted you to be aware of it since it was a response to something you wrote. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Sept 2012 edition

--

  • The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration Community (http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/summaries/The%20Rise%20and%20Decline/): This paper addresses adds to the discourse on one of the most popular field of Wikipedia studies, namely - the trends in editor growth (or shrinkage) and retention. The number of active Wikipedia editors have been declining since 2007. In their attempt to explain the reasons for this decline, the authors note that Wikipedia is no longer "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit"; rather, it is "the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes himself, dodges the impersonal wall of semiautomated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his time and energy can edit". The authors point to three factors contributing to this new reality, and the negative trend of editors number decline.

First, Wikipedia is increasingly likely to reject newcomers contributions, be it in the form of reverts or deletions. Second, it is increasingly likely to meet them with depersonalized messages; the authors cite a study that shows that by mid 2008 over half of new users received their first message in a depersonalized format, usually as a warning from a bot, or an editor using a semi-automated tool. They conclude that there is a correlation between the growing use of various depersonalized tools for dealing with newcomers, and the dropping retention of newcomers. They use of those tools creates a rather negative first impression, making newcomers less likely to stay around. The authors conclude that unwanted but good faithed contributions were handled differently in the early years of the project, in a way that was more personal and less demotivating. Startlingly, the authors find that a significant number of first time editors will make an inquiry about their reverted edit on the talk page of the article they were reverted on, only to be ignored by the more experienced Wikipedians who never check up on the talk pages of the pages they have reverted (authors show in particular the users of semi-automated tools like Huggle or Twinkle are less likely to follow up and enter a discussion with such editors, compared to the editors who do not use such tools). The authors point out that the experienced Wikipedia editors are thus increasingly less likely to follow up on their own Wikipedia:Bold, revert, discuss policy, particularly when dealing with newcomers, who are increasingly assumed as unworthy of being engaged in discussion following a revert, and if engaged, they are simply treated to a depersonalized, demoralizing, and often complex templated warning message.

As a third factor, the authors note that majority of Wikipedia rules were created before 2007 and have not changed much since, and thus new editors face the environment where they have little influence on the rules creation. Further, they often have to face the rule-savvy old editors, automatically falling into the inferior position in most discussions due to their limited understanding of said policies. At the same time, authors argue that it the newcomers are more affected by those policies, compared to the established editors. The authors note that this violates Ostrom's 3rd principle for stable local common pool resource management, by effectively excluding a group that is very vulnerable to certain rules from being able to effectively influence them.

The authors recognize that automated tools and extensive rules are needed to deal with vandalism and manage a complex project, but they caution that the currently evolved costumes and procedures are not sustainable in the long term. They suggest that experienced Wikipedia editors need to be more open to personalized and friendly dealing with unwanted but good faithed contributions, and that Wikipedia needs to refocus its energies from dealing with vandals (a task that the authors conclude has already been sufficiently achieved to guarantee future stability) to mentoring newcomers (a task in which Wikipedia increasingly fails, and which threatens its future survival). Further, the recommend that the newcomers are given a larger voice when it comes to the rules creation and modification.

Overall, the authors present a series of very compelling arguments, and the only complain this reviewer has is that the authors do not discuss the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation and the wider community has recognized similar issues, and has engaged in debates, studies, pilot programs and such aimed to remedy the issue (see for example the WMF Editor Trends Study).

I definitely enjoyed this paper. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 21:57, 21 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Great review, thanks. It should perhaps be remarked that three of the four authors were among the Foundation's visiting researchers for the Summer of Research 2011, so the shortcoming you point out in the last paragraph can perhaps be explained as exaggerated modesty ;) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--

  • Technology Affordances: The Case of Wikipedia ([25])

This paper, framing itself as part of the ecological psychology field, contribute to the discourse about affordances (property of an object that allows one to take a certain action). They argue that this term can be developed to further our understanding of how individuals perceive their socio-technical environment. The authors refine the term "technology affordances", which they define as "functional and relational properties of the user-technology system". Then use Wikipedia as their case study attempting to demonstrate its value, listing six affordances of Wikipedia (or in other words, they note that editors of Wikipedia can take the following six actions): contribution, control, management, collaboration, self-presentation, broadcasting.

Uh, sorry, Tilman. I actually am not that fond of such theory-heavy papers, and don't think I can keep writing this without becoming way to sarcastic about what "practical value" (the term used by the authors) this theoretical contraption can have. As far as I am concerned, affordance is just a rather unnecessarily word for a concept that can be defined in a short sentence, and that does not contribute much once defined. Shrugh. I struggle to find any value in this beyond what I have written above. The argument that those those are the six actions editors can take may be interesting, but the framing of the article through the language of affordance theory, and associated theorizing, is putting me off. Perhaps somebody else can add some more value to this review. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 22:37, 21 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, and I can relate to that kind of frustration. Also, I don't want to put too much burden on you by treating you as the go-to reviewer for humanities papers.
That being said, I think our service to the reader consists often in "we read this so you don't have to", so hopefully your selfless sacrifice in reading this paper will not have been in vain ;) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You and others are more than welcome to add to, correct and modify the reviews I submit to you (Signpost) as needed. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:16, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--

  • Investigation on factors that influence the (geo)spatial characteristics of Wikipedia articles ([26])

The authors attempt to identify what makes Wikipedia articles with geographical coordinates different from others (besides their obvious relation to geographical locations). They rather unsurprisingly find that more developed articles are more likely to have geo-coordinates, and consequently they find that there seems to be a correlation between article quality and having geo-coordinates links. They also find that articles with geo-coordinates are more likely to be linked to, a likely function of them being above-average quality.

If there is any other claim of value or interest here, I am missing it. Overall, a good example of a paper which does not contribute anything of real value (or perhaps I am in a sarcastic mood today... I could say anything is worth a study, but sadly, too often we find that there is nothing unexpecting/interesting to be written once we have the data). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 22:50, 21 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--

  • {{Citation needed}}: The dynamics of referencing in Wikipedia ([27]):

This paper contributes to the debates on Wikipedia's reliability. The authors find that density of references is correlated with the article length (the longer the article, the more references it will have per given amount of text). They also find that references attract more references (suggesting a form of a snowball mechanism at work) and that majority of references are added in short periods of time by editors who are more experienced, and who are also adding substantial content. The authors thus conclude that referencing is primarily done by a small number of experienced editors, who prefer to work on longer articles, and who drastically raise the article's quality, by both adding more content, and by adding more references.

Interesting, but for some reason I am not sure how to expand on this. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 23:53, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

--

  • Etiquette in Wikipedia: Weening New Editors into Productive Ones ([28])

This would probably look good tied to the longer review I presented above.

The authors of this paper experimented with alternative warning messages, introducing a set of shorter and more personalized warnings into those delivered by Huggle in the period of November 8 0 December 9 2011. Unfortunately, the authors are rather unclear on how exactly was the Huggle tool influenced, and whether the community was consulted on that. While in fact the community and Huggle developers have been aware of, discussed and approved of this experiment - here or here - the paper omission to clarify that this was the case can lead to some confusion with regards to research ethics, as a casual reader may assume the researchers have hijacked Huggle without consulting with the community. The wording change was good faithed (making the messages more personalized, friendly and short), and the authors conclude that the new messages they tested proved more conductive to positively influenced new editors who received Level 1 Warnings.

Interesting. It may be good if you and others would look at that paper to verify my question about ethics and security is not missing anything; I based it on the short description at the end of page 2. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:09, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I had a quick look and it seems pretty certain that the community was informed of the Huggle experiment, see e.g. here or here, which also seems to list the exact template versions tested. I agree that the paper might have benefitted from a link to the latter, at least; but I don't understand what the security concerns might have been? (AFAIK they collaborated with the Huggle developers.)
Please let me know if you want to make further edits to this or other reviews, but I'm adding the drafts now to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-09-24/Recent research. Thanks again! Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The security concern would be that Huggle can be tweaked by anybody. As you point out (good finds!), this isn't the case, so I've amended the review to reflect this (feel free to tweak it further). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:16, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A kitten for you!

No idea what happened here -- thanks for fixing!

Theopolisme 15:14, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Aww, cute! Thanks, and no worries! Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Oct 2012 edition

I know it's early, but I've been reading [29] and thought I might as well review it. I'll post something here soon. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 22:54, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The authors, coming from the social control perspective, and employing the repertory grid technique, contribute some interesting observations regarding the governance of Wikipedia. The paper begins with a helpful if cursory overview of governance theories, moving towards the governance of open source communities and Wikipedia. Alas, that cursory treatment is not fullproof; for example the authors mention "bazaar style governance", but attribute it incorrectly (rather than the 2006 work they cite, the coining of this term dates to Eric S. Raymond's 1999 The Cathedral and the Bazaar). The authors have interviewed a number of Wikipedians and identified a number of formal and informal governance mechanisms. Only one formal mechanism was deemed important - the policies; whereas seven informal mechanisms were deemed as such: collaboration among users, discussions on article talk page, facilitation by experienced users, individuals acting as guardian of the articles, inviting individuals to participate, large numbers of editors, and participation by highly reputable user. Notably, the interviewed editors did not view as important elements such as administrator involvement, mediation or voting. The authors conclude that "in the everyday practice of content creation, the informal mechanisms appear to be significantly more important than the formal mechanisms", and note that this likely means that the formal mechanisms are used much more sparingly than informal ones, most likely only in the small percentage of cases where the informal mechanisms fail to provide an agreeable solution for all the parties. The authors also stress that it editors are not equal, and certain editors (and groups) have much more power than others, a fact that is quickly recognized by all editors. Finally, the authors note the importance of transparent interactions in spaces like talk pages, and note that "the reported use of interaction channels outside the Wikipedia platform (e.g., e-mail) is a cause for concern, as these channels limit involvement and reduce transparency." Citing Ostrom's governance principles, they note that "ensuring participation and transparency is crucial for maintaining the stability of self-governing communities." --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 23:29, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Nice! I've listed it in the Etherpad (which should always be done to avoid double efforts). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't realize the pad was up, I'll take a look and start reviewing things. Btw, can I ask you to copy your replies to my talk page? Otherwise I don't get notifications if you reply and have to check your talk page for that. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:25, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewing [30]:

  • This paper looks at the relationships between Wikipedians from the social network analysis perspective (nodes are defined as authors, and links, as indicators of collaboration on the same article), also treating Wikipedia as an online social network (similar to Facebook). The authors note that while Wikipedia is not primarily a social network site (as Facebook), it has enough of the social networking qualities to justify being seen as such. They note that Wikipedia can be seen as a very good source of information about online relationship between actors, due to the transparent and public nature of its data. The authors present a brief overview of previous work with a similar approach. Rather unsurprisingly, the authors find that in the very early days of Wikipedia, editors were much more likely to know one another and collaborate on same articles than in the later years. They also find that the number of editors is highly correlated to the the editors' familiarity with one another, and is more relevant than the number of articles, as they find that from 2007, when the number of editors roughly stabilized, so did their levels of connectedness through collaboration. They also show that with very few exceptions (low activity, specialized editors) all Wikipedia editors are connected to one another, and there are no isolated groups (or topic areas). The authors also find that the Wikipedia collaborations can be analyzed using the small-world network approach (suggesting that the distance between editors, defined as the average path length, with links being articles contributed to, is very small). The article focuses primarily on the mathematical side of the social network analysis, and unfortunately offers little commentary or analysis of the findings. The validity of the results can also be questioned as the authors treat bots and semi-automated accounts as "regular authors"; considering that majority of Wikipedia articles has been edited by bots of script-using editors, the finding that editor A can be connected to editor B through the fact that they both edited different pages which in turn were edited by the same bot or script-using editor is hardly surprising. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:25, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewing [31]

  • The authors focus on conflict on Wikipedia, analyzing it from the social network analysis perspective (nodes are defined as individuals, and links, as indicators of conflict), and differentiating between positive and negative types of conflict. Their goal is to further the understanding of conflict mechanism in the mass collaboration setting. The authors find that "that participation positively influences task complexity, conflict, and group performance; task complexity positively influences group performance but negatively influences conflict; and conflict positively influences group performance".
I am sorry, I am having really hard trouble transforming the paper findings into anything in plain language; I think that the authors do a pretty poor job of explaining some concepts, and later, discussing them. I also think they may be contradicting themselves in the discussion - that or I am getting confused by some double negatives. Compare: "H5: Task complexity positively influences conflict." to "the results disprove the hypothesis that task complexity has a negative influence on generating conflict". I think the second sentence should say positive, not negative (findings state that "Results also show that task complexity ... reduces the score of conflict"). Overall, I think they say that the number of editors leads both to better articles and more conflict - so far so good, but I am rather at a loss by their arguments that article (task?) complexity leads to better performance of editors, and that that performance leads to more conflict; they don't really seem to discuss this beyond some early and not very clear theory review. Their major point in the discussion is that the more complex an article, the less likely it is to generate conflict, which is somewhat interesting, but I'd very much appreciate a second opinion on whether I am reading this right. The more academic articles I read, the more puzzled I am how certain things get published, sigh. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Nov 2012 edition

Reviewing [32]:

  • This article studies the discussion pages of English and German September 11 attacks articles, contributing to the ongoing debates on collaborative knowledge creation in the wiki Web 2.0 context, participation of experts and amateurs on Wikipedia, and, indirectly, reliability of Wikipedia. The article's research question, coming from the sociology of knowledge and social constructivism perspectives, is concerned to what degree the Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" policy democratizes the production of knowledge, removing it from traditional hierarchies "between experts and lay participants". The term 'democratization' here is used in the context of such theoretical concepts as wisdom of crowds, participatory culture, produsage and (more critically) cult of the amateur or digital Maoism, all referring to the fact that Wikipedia's editors are more often amateurs ("lay participants") than professionally recognized experts. The study, using the grounded theory approach, focused not on editors, but on their arguments. The study finds that due to community-upheld Wikipedia's policies such as Wikipedia:Reliable sources, dissenting opinions ("traditionally marginalized types of knowledge") such as various conspiracy theories are still marginalized or straight out excluded, which according to authors "did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies". This finding should be taken in a certain context; as the authors note, the article was written by amateurs ("lay participants"), who however decided to reproduce traditional knowledge hierarchies, relegating various conspiracy theories and similar points not backed up to reliable sources to obscurity on Wikipedia. The authors also conclude that Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, is prone to a "scientism bias", i.e. treating scientifically-backed knowledge as "better" than knowledge coming from alternative outlets. This despite the "anyone can edit" motto of Wikipedia, the authors find support for the argument that Wikipedia puts more stress on article quality than democratic participation, or in words of the author: "Although laypeople apparently play a significant part in the text production, this does not mean that they favor lay knowledge. On the contrary, it is clearly elite knowledge of well-established authorities which is finally included in the article, whereas alternative interpretations are harshly excluded or at least marginalized."

Incidentally, this reviewer found the authors use of a Firefox add-on Wired-Maker for content analysis rather ingenious, and applauds them for mentioning such a practical methodological tip in their paper.

A nice surprise, a paper I enjoyed quite a lot. Good start for this month! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:54, 15 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Brief review of [33]:

  • This article focuses on some differences between featured and non-featured article. Unsurprisingly, the authors main finding is that the featured article are more stable after promotion; the interesting contribution of the authors lays more in their detailed methodology, and categorization of various types of edits.

Uninspiring, although the authors did put some effort into methodology. I noted two papers I could try reviewing in epad, but don't have access to. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 22:45, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I was considering reviewing this, March conference, but I think wasn't online till now. Should I? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 19:36, 23 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

RR

Tilman, nice Research report this month! Tony (talk) 10:14, 28 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Dec 2012 edition

Sorry for the late and sparse report, Holidays and New Year makes for a bit of a bad timing for me. Will try to post something very soon - just giving you the heads up! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:58, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/11/start/wikipedias-top-20-religion-pips-science
While not a real academic article, and more in the realm of popular science, Wired, among others, published an infographic attributed to César Hidalgo, head of the Media Lab's Macro Connections group, visualizing "History's most influential people". Unfortunately, the small article does not provide any methodology, nor does it provide much discussion. Until a more extensive description is released, the current graph, while pretty, is little more than a trivia piece.
http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4043/3380
This article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the January 18, 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focues on the question of legitimacy, looking at how did the Wikipedia community arrive at the decision to participate in those protests.
The paper first provides an interesting discussion of legitimacy in Wikipedia's governance. Then it discusses the legitimacy of the decision to participate in the protests. The author correctly notes that initiative was given a major boost from Jimmy Wales' charismatic authority, as Wales posted a straw poll about the issue on his talk page on December 10, 2001, as while the issue was discussed by community before (for example, in mid-November at the Village Pump), those discussions attracted much less attention. Whether the protest would happen without Jimbo's push for more discussion it's hard to say, as it veers towards the "what if" territory; as things happen, it is true that Jimbo's actions begun a landslide that led to the protests. This reviewer is however more puzzled at the caim made in the introduction of the article that the discussion involved a "massive involvement of the Wikimedia Foundation staff". While several WMF staffers were active in the discussions in the official capacity, and while WMF did issue some official statements about the ongoing discussion, the paper certainly does not provide any evidence to justify the word "massive". Later in the paper, the author does note that WMF focused on providing information and gently steering the discussion, without any coercion; this hardly justifies the claim of "massive involvement". At the very least, this reviewer would like to see a clear number of how many WMF staffers participated in the discussion before such a grandiose adjective as "massive" is used. It is true that the WMF staffers helped push the discussion forward, but this reviewer believes that the paper does not sufficiently justifies the stress it puts on their participation, and thus may overestimate their influence.
In the third part of the paper, the author discusses how the arguments about legitimacy or lack of it framed the subsequent discourse of the voters. The author notes that after initial period of discussing SOPA itself, the discussion of whether it is legitimate or not for Wikipedia to become involved in the protest took over, with a major justification for it emerging in the form of an argument that it is legitimate for Wikipedia to protest against SOPA as SOPA threatents Wikipedia itself. While this is a very interesting claim, unfortunately, other than citing one single comment, the author provides no other qualitative or quantitative data here; nor is the methodology discussed anywhere. We are not told how many individuals voted, how many commented on legitimacy or illegitimacy, how many felt that Wikipedia is threatened, we do not know how did the author classify comments supporting any of the mentioned viewpoint, or the shifts in the discussion... this list could unfortunately go on. In one specific example drawn from the conclusion, the author writes that "The main factor that shaped the multi–phased process was the will to have the community accept the final decision as legitimate, and avoid backlash. This factor especially influenced those who are suspected of relying on traditional means of legitimacy such as charisma or professionalism." At the same time, we are provided with no number, no percentage, and certainly no correlation to back up this claim. Without clear data nor methodology it is hard to verify authors claims and conclusions, as all we have to go on is her word that she indeed observed those patterns.
In the introduction, the author also noted that "the mass effort of planning an effective political action was not something “anyone can edit”" and "the debate preceding the blackout did not follow Wikipedia’s open and anarchic decision–making system"; unfortunately this reviewer finds no justification for those rather strong claims anywhere else in the article.
Overall, this is an interesting paper about legitimacy in Wikipedia, however it seems to overreach itself when it tries to draw conclusions from the data that is simply not presented to the reader. It suffers from a lack of methodology section, making verification of the claim made very hard, from the lack of hard data, making most conclusions, unfortunately, dubious, and from a tendency to make strong claims that are not backed up by data or even developed later on.

All right, Till, I know this is a bit harsh, but the thing is I have researched the SOPA protests extensively (I have a paper of my own on SOPA under review), and I think I know what I am talking about here. If I was reviewing this paper for the journal, I wouldn't accept it, and I thought FM had higher standards. It is a revise and resubmit, at best (c'mon, no methodology, no numbers, where is the author drawing all those claims from??). Sigh. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:08, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Complaining edit-summary

I see aspersions were cast in the usual way. No thanks for fixing up the host of glitches. And you didn't even fix the incomprehensible sentence I'd pointed out in MY edit-summary. Tony (talk) 09:18, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry if [34] caused you emotional distress. I do think that copyedits (in particular those after publication) should not introduce new errors, and that a broken link is more of an inconvenience for the reader than a "wrong" title capitalization preference.
I can't see where you pointed out an incomprehensible sentence in your edit summaries, do you have a diff link?
Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk)
No, you're not sorry at all: you continue to put me down. I could play the same game if you wanted—like pointing out that your post above has a basic grammatical fault; but why bother? If you want to write at a professional level, you'll need to do some reading. Tony (talk) 00:11, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple watchlists

I saw your comment at the signpost op-ed. What about us getting multiple watchlists? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 02:36, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Biosthmors, you may have noticed that my wording was a little more cautious than that ;) But: The Echo notifications feature (which is expected to be activated, in a first version, here on the English Wikipedia in February) is indeed going to include some form of alert about new watchlist entries (which could look like this), and it is hoped that later versions will support cross-wiki notifications. I recommend exploring the project page on the MediaWiki wiki, including the presentation slides and further wiki pages linked there, trying out the prototype, and getting in contact with the developer team directly - e.g. in their next IRC Office hour.
You may also be interested in these further-reaching ideas on how to support WikiProjects with a better notifications system, although they are not yet part of Echo in its current form. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:14, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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