User:Jtmorgan/sandbox

One of the earliest research papers on Wikipedia is called Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, then of IBM Research. In that paper, the researchers perform a series of analyses of Wikipedia, including visualizations of article growth using their HistoryFlow visualization platform, in order to understand how Wikipedia editors coordinate their activities around content production, curation, and quality control. Their analysis revealed that between 2003 and 2005, Wikipedia talk pages grew at a greater rate than article pages—which suggested that explicit coordination among editors had become increasingly important as the community and encyclopedia grew. In order to investigate this trend, they performed content analysis on a purposeful sample of 25 article talk pages in order to understand how these discussion spaces support article development. Among their findings were that 58% of talk page posts included requests or proposals to edit the related article. Other types of talk page posts included requests for information about the article, references to vandalism, references to policy, and off-topic remarks.

The findings and methods from Talk Before You Type have informed many subsequent studies of Wikipedia. As of September 2018, the study has been cited over 400 times according to Google Scholar. However, the content analysis portion of the study focused on a relatively small number of talk pages, and only talk pages on English Wikipedia. Furthermore, the study was conducted over a decade ago. So it's fair to ask: do other language editions of Wikipedia use talkpages the same way as EnWiki does? And how may have collaboration practices on EnWiki itself changed in the intervening decade?

A recent paper published in the proceedings of the 2018 OpenSym conference addresses both of these questions. That paper Do We All Talk Before We Type?: Understanding Collaboration in Wikipedia Language Editions, written by researchers at the University of Washington, attempts to replicate Viégas and Wattenberg's content analysis using a larger and more recent sample of talk page posts from English, Spanish, and French Wikipedias. The researchers find evidence that different Wikipedia communities use talk pages differently: for example, Spanish Wikipedia articles seem to feature an overall higher proportion of requests for information than either English or French, and a higher proportion of Information Boxes. However, the most striking result of their study is that while proportions of different kinds of talk page posts are broadly similar across the three Wikipedias they analyzed, they are all substantially different from the results of the 2007 study. In particular, while Viégas and Wattenberg found that 58% of talk page posts included requests for editing coordination, only 35%-37% of posts in the newer sample implicated coordinated editing activity.

This result suggests that the way editors use talk pages has changed dramatically since the 2005 sample was collected. It may be an indication of changes in the focus of editing work on Wikipedia. Perhaps the work of maintaining a relatively large and 'full' Wikipedia requires less direct coordination than was necessary during a time earlier in the project's development, when more editors focused on writing and expanding new articles. It's also possible that the Wikipedia editor communities, which now contain a much higher proportion of experienced editors, are able to coordinate their activities more effectively in a stigmergic manner, making "talking before you type" less necessary. Future research could build on this work by examining other differences between the editing dynamics of other relatively older and younger Wikipedias, as well as examine potential cultural forces that mediate how editing communities talk to, and work with, one another.