User talk:Tbayer (WMF)/Archive 2011-2014

WMF censored logo
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&#124; talk to me 23:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
 * 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 over  (= 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)

"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)
 * 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)
 * 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)

Unpublished research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 I see that the pdf file says, inter alia, "Under review—do not cite."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)
 * 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)

Wikipedia research
I wish I had more time right now, I am somewhat busy today. But here are short summaries of:
 * : 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."
 * : 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.
 * : 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&#124; talk to me 16:42, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Re: Wikimedia Research Newsletter
I'll try to help and review social science papers again! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 19:31, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

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&#124; talk to me 21:26, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * : 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.
 * : 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)
 * 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&#124; talk to me 21:52, 22 February 2012 (UTC)


 * : looked interesting, but this is work in progress, no findings, so I suggest we drop it


 * : 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&#124; talk to me 21:57, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 17:56, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * : 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]
 * : 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.
 * 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)
 * 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&#124; talk to me 20:42, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

Also, on the subject of teaching with Wikipedia, this seems relevant, so I suggest we add it: --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 19:11, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * "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.
 * 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)
 * Hard to say, but I thought we could put it next to the other teaching piece? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 20:42, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, as a side remark it could actually work. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I am back now and I'll try to review at least the one you've pointed out shortly. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 17:06, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I've expanded that review based on my own impressions. I've also read:


 * , which has a very nice abstracts summarizing the important findings and conclusions
 * : 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&#124; talk to me 19:40, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
 * 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 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)

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 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.
 * : 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..
 * 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)


 * : 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%).


 * if I begin a review of any other paper, I'll mark it in the pad. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 00:05, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

Invitation for AdminConvention
Moin Tbayer please take a look at this edit. Cheers Sargoth (talk) 22:44, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The workshop was cancelled, thanks for your attention. Sargoth (talk) 09:05, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

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

 * I will see if I can review other articles for tomorrow, perhaps in 12h or so. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 16:28, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

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 Civility and 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 Notes_on_good_practices_on_Wikipedia_research. Also, I found time to review. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 16:26, 29 May 2012 (UTC)


 * 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 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.

You've got mail
<b style="color:#01796F;">Pine</b><sup style="color:#01796F;">✉ 01:24, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's reasearch for 26 June 2012 edition
For /. 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). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:16, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

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)

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 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:25, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * I thought they all were online and covered. How about we ask Mako about this, he contributes to the newsletter too, right? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:11, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

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? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 20:15, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 20:58, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

--

Now, on to. 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 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 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 :) --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 20:55, 26 August 2012 (UTC)


 * 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... --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 21:16, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 21:36, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
 * All added to Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-27/Recent research. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Recent Research suggestion
I suggest including the information about courts citing Wikipedia described in Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-20/In the news. <span style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#008C3A 0.1em 0.1em 1.5em,#01796F -0.1em -0.1em 1.5em;"><b style="color:#01796F;">Pine</b><sup style="color:#01796F;">✉ 09:07, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

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)
 * 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)

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)
 * 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)

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). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:45, 30 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

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 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 21:57, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

--
 * Technology Affordances: The Case of Wikipedia

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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 22:37, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * You and others are more than welcome to add to, correct and modify the reviews I submit to you (Signpost) as needed. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 02:16, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

--
 * Investigation on factors that influence the (geo)spatial characteristics of Wikipedia articles

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). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  22:50, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

--
 * : The dynamics of referencing in Wikipedia :

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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 23:53, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

--
 * Etiquette in Wikipedia: Weening New Editors into Productive Ones

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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 00:09, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
 * 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 Signpost/2012-09-24/Recent research. Thanks again! Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
 * 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). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 02:16, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

A kitten for you!
No idea what happened here -- thanks for fixing!

 Theo polisme  15:14, 23 September 2012 (UTC) <br style="clear: both"/>
 * Aww, cute! Thanks, and no worries! Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Oct 2012 edition
I know it's early, but I've been reading and thought I might as well review it. I'll post something here soon. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 22:54, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
 * 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." --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 23:29, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:25, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Reviewing :
 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:25, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Reviewing
 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  18:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Nov 2012 edition
Reviewing :
 * 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 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! --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 20:54, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Brief review of :
 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 22:45, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I was considering reviewing this, March conference, but I think wasn't online till now. Should I? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 19:36, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

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

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! --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:58, 31 December 2012 (UTC)


 * 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. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:08, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

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)
 * I'm sorry if 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)

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)
 * 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)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Jan 2013 edition

 * Polish paper: not even online, please rant about it :)
 * : In this paper, Reagle talks about the gender gap in free culture and free and open source software communities. Wikipedia is one of the case studies discussed, but Reagle makes valid observations that it is not so much an exception but a rule in this wider context.
 * : In this blog run by four ethnographers, one of the authors discussed a Wired inforgraphic we discussed in a recent issue . As we already noted previously, the author also criticizes the infographic and the accompanying article for lacking any serious description of methodology. He notes that given those shortcomings, the claims made by article are rather dubious, and the cited research might have well been misquoted. The author further notes that any research that attempts to draw conclusions about "national culture" from analyzin differnet language Wikipedias runs into a major issue, that is that languages don't always map easily onto national cultures (consider - what is the national culture of Portuguese or English?). He further illustrates this by discussing how often African-language Wikipedians are edited primarily by individuals living outside the country most often associated with a given language.
 * if you sent me the pdf for I'll take a look at it. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  15:59, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Regarding the pdf paper, here you go. It was a decent paper, although it could benefit from much less jargon. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:37, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The paper used the theory of bounded rationality and a heuristic-systematic model to analyze American college students’ credibility judgments and heuristics concerning Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, authors observe that students used a heuristic (a mental shortcut, such as An article with a long list of references is more credible than with of a short one) in assessing the credibility of Wikipedia. Students (regardless of their knowledge) were much more likely to focus on the number of references then on their quality, and the same article would be seen as more credible depending on how many references it had. The authors conclude that educators need to teach student how to judge the quality of Wikipedia articles that goes beyond checking whether the article has references (and how many). The authors recommend that Wikipedia makes its own assessments (such as the Featured Article star, currently visible only as a small bronze star icon on the top right-hand corner of the article’s page) much more prominent. (This reviewer strongly agrees with the conclusion, unfortunately the last community discussion to that extent he is aware achieved little).
 * More interestingly, the authors also find that people with more knowledge found Wikipedia more credible, suggesting that people with low knowledge may be more uneasy with Wikipedia. The authors suggest that reliability of Wikipedia would be increased if more professional associations implemented programs such s Association for Psychological Science Wikipedia Initiative. In addition to getting the experts more involved in Wikipedia content creation, the authors suggest that a good idea may be for "professional associations themselves [to] provide their own endorsement for the quality of articles in their fields."
 * The authors also note that peer endorsement is an important factor in credibility, and that the Article Feedback Tool is a step in the right direction, as it provided another credibility assessment for the readers. They note, however, that compared to similar tools implemented on other sites (such as Amazon), "Wikipedia readers need to click on ‘‘View Page Rating,’’ which requires one more step to find out that information. The average readers may not be inclined to do so. It would be useful to display ratings without clicking".

In other news, did someone review ? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:41, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! No, the paper by Forte and Lampe has not been covered yet. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 13:46, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for Feb 2013 edition
Starting early, as my next few weeks may be crazy. I wanted to review but I have no access to it. If you could see about anyone being able to send it my way, I'll try to do so, but otherwise I will probably not be able to read it. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:50, 19 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The article analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, through qualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90 minutes interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity with Web 2.0 educational tools and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedua is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) "the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct," 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts whether the Wikipedia crowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note: but of course...), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research "too easy" for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia's non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as "this is a commercial business; it wants to make money" an "they are obviously doing it from a business perspective", and another concerned about "politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]". All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also founds that all five lectures use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students away. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia's reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) "Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes." 2) "Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge." and 3) "Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff." --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:09, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

RR
Hey Tilman, before you have to ask me ;-), you'll have until early Wednesday morning to finish the research report&mdash;I'm waiting on email replies about Commons' PotY, so it's no trouble. Thanks for all you do! Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 09:35, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ed, useful to know ;) Will see that we have it ready before 6am UTC. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:15, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for March 2013 edition
Reviewing: Determinants of collective intelligence quality: comparison between Wiki and Q&A services in English and Korean users (I thought sb was supposed to review it last month, but since I guess it hasn't and I have the pdf, here it is). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:23, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

In South Korea, Wikipedia lags behind several other services in popularity, such as Naver's KnowledgeiN knowledge market Q&A service. This paper compares English and Korean Wikipedia to the KnowledgeiN service, and analyzes some of the factors involved in how users perceive quality in wikis and Q&A services. About 200 users of each of the three websites participated in the survey. Authors find that perceived quality is helps to determine how useful the users are going to see a given site as. Previous rsearch which suggests that community expertise, size and diversity all contribute to quality is confirmed, and those factors are recognized and valued by the general public. As might be expected, the authors find that users of Q&A sites value expertise of contributors more so than users of wikis. In turn, wikis rely on the size of their community to achieve quality. Predictably, the authors conclude that the smaller Wikipedias such as the Korean one suffer from small community size, and recommend that to improve the quality and popularity of such Wikipedians, more editors should be recruited. The study notes a number of limitations that affected it; notably it did not take into account any possible cultural differences, and does not provide any discussion of why Wikipedia's popularity in Korea is lacking compared to many other websites, such as the KnowledgeiN one.


 * Re: The selected quote in the pad is worth quoting in full.

This is a dissertation, and I don't feel likr reading it all. But the discussion of the Wikipedia student club is interesting, see p. 168+ We can briefly summarize this as (the first?) study of how a Wikipedia student club can influence the student editors, and then cite the quote above
 * re: Sadly, this paper is a bit of a mess. It discusses two innovations (using Wikiversity - not sure how, and rpging in a classroom). I find it not clear which of those two  methods increases motivation; the paper does seem to focus on the rpging more than the wikis. Also, the students develop a page on the wikiversity... who reads that? I guess if we were to say something positive is that Wikiversity has been used in a some class, and can give students some experience in editing a wiki.


 * Re: discusses the paper at ... but that paper doesn't mention Wikipedia at all? I can only conclude that the journalist contacted the authors and got the following estimate of interest to us from correspondence with them.

Shane Greenstein attempted to calculatee the monetary value of consumer surplus generated by broadband Internet, focusing on how much value Internet is providing for free (that otherwise people woul be prepared to pay). Wikipedia accounted for up to $50m of that surplus - in other words, Wikipedia provides a good that otherwise people would be willing to buy, spending $50m on it that instead they get to spend on something else.


 * re: (this is yet another dissertation, and at 94 pages this is a small book, so I am only going to look at some chapters of interest to us). The study finds that the University of Windsor, treated as a case study, is torn between two groups: one encoruaging the use of new digital tools like Wikipedia, and the other, conservative, opposed to it.There is a general lack of understanding of Wikipedia (note: let's tie this to last month (?) similar research). Many participants (instructors, scholars) use Wikipedia and recognize it has been improving and becoming more convinient, but are mostly unwillin to participate in it; one participant noted that doing so would be a career "academic suicide". Nonetheless the study also suggest that there is a significant sympathy for Wikipedia, and many interviewees indicated that they would like to contribute, but are stymed by "lck of time, lack of academic credit, and overall lack of resources to do work not directly related to their professional responsibilities." Wikipedia outreach to academia is seen as noble, but likely not to progress quicky due to those issues.

Newsroom note
I'm sorry Tilman, I never saw [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom&diff=547271061&oldid=547148810 this] message. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 23:45, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for April 2013 edition
I recently read a number of papers, let me know if any of those should be reviewed for the next edition:, ,  and. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:00, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The third one was covered in the last issue, reviews for the others would be welcome. I added them to the pad. BTW, I can recommend the archive search, it is becoming more and more useful. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 06:40, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * suffers from a terribly small student size, something like ~10, and as such seems not likely to provide any useful data. At best, mentioning it as a sidenote or short bullet point is sufficient.
 * . The authors review how Wikipedia and Britannica coverage of topics related to several major coprorations has changed in the past 6 years. They find unsurprisingly that Wikipedia coverage is usually much more detailed that those of Britannica; more interestingly, they note that one of the key differences is that Wikipedia focuses more on issues such as corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues, whereas Britannica will focus more on traditional aspects such as financial results. They note that both encyclopedias, while striving towards some form of neutrality, contain non-neutral ("positively and negatively framed") content, although it is more common to find it in Wikipedia. They also note that this content seemed to peak around 2008-2010, and attribute it to the negative views of major coproprations common among the general public around that time, whose view was more likely to be represented on Wikipedia than on Britannica, also correlating this with the economic recession. The authors note that increasingly, knowledge available to general public comes from social media collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, and are doubtful whether more traditional models like that of Britannica have a future.
 * [earthlab.uoi.gr/ojs/theste/index.php/theste/article/view/109] presents a relatively useful literature review of literature dealing with the "teaching with Wikipedia" approach. The authors analyzed several scholarly databases (not explaining, however, why the selected ones were chosen and others were not), finding 30 works on related theme, and selecting 24 of those. They provide a number of useful breakdowns (2/3 of the works deal with higher education, 1/3 with secondary, none with primary) and analyze expected learning outcomes (the most popular being learning research methodology), knowledge fields that the papers represented (mostly fields of social science), and an overview of student tasks. While containing few revelations, the paper is a solid example of a literature review of an emerging fields, and contains a valuable observation that more research is needed on how Wikipedia is used by elementary school students.
 * --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:21, 17 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Can you link me to the etherpad? I keep loosing the link. In other news, can you recall any paper on reasons for editors leaving Wikipedia other than data published at Wikipedia Editor Survey 2011? This never got far, from what I see. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:30, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The link at m:Research:Newsletter should always be up to date. The Former Contributors survey was also presented at Wikimania 2010 with these slides, but I don't know if they contain any further analysis. You linked to the April 2011 editor survey; the subsequent November/December 2011 editor survey contains a question asking those respondents who said they had become less active recently for the reasons (which we repeated in the 2012 editor survey, the results of which should become available soon). Other than that, I'm not aware of anything at the moment. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for May 2013 edition
Reviewing: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17087904&show=abstract

The paper offers a much needed comparison data from a population of editors outside English Wikipedia. Most findings related to reasons people start and continue contributing confirm previous studies - important reasons for contributing include desire to share knowledge, gaining recognition, and are reinforced by friendly interactions. Interestingly, the authors find that another significant motivation of "content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language" also plays a major factor, something that is missing or seen as mostly irrelevant for contributors to the English Wikipedia. The authors also look at reasons for editors to be come less active, an area that is not as well understood. Their findings here again confirm some previous research - ediors may leave because they find to rules too confusing, editors too unfriendly, or have not enough time. They also list some addition reasons not mentioned significently in the existing literature, such as "issues with Persian script; sociocultural characteristics e.g. lack of research-based teaching instruction and preference for ready-to-use information; • strict rules against mass copying and copyright violation;  small size of Persian Web content and a shortage of online Persian references." Unfortunately, the paper suffers from small sample (interviews with 15 editors) and does not report statistics or rankings for some of the data, for example making it difficult to conclude or verify which motivations are more or less important. (Reviewer note: the reviewed pre-print copy did not include figures, which may contain the missing data).

Should we wait for a fuller version? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:58, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I don't think we should postpone our coverage, but it may indeed be a reason to judge the piece with caution. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

http://www.savap.org.pk/journals/ARInt./Vol.4%282%29/2013%284.2-23%29.pdf

The study looks at a tiny sample of nine undergraduates from the Sunway University in Malaysia. The students in the ENGL1050: Thoughts and writing class were assigned to discuss a topic on Wikipedia. Although the paper does not cite any specific page or account name, based on the description provided the account User:ENGL1050 can be identified. Wikipedia was used as a discussion forum, with the instructor(s) and the student using a single account, and all of their edits consisting of editing the User:ENGL1050 page. The students had generally favorite view of the assignment, with majority agreeing that it is a useful tool of learning, collaboration and improving their English skills. Nonetheless it is clear that the instructor(s) is not familiar with the basics of School and university projects, nor with the basic guidelines such as WP:NOTAFORUM. The described activity had nothing to do with Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, and treated Wikipedia simply as a popular wiki host. (The instructor(s) was likely not aware of the existence of Wikiversity, where such an activity would be within the project scope). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:07, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235974898_Most_popular_contents_requested_by_users_in_different_Wikipedia_editions

This paper poses an interesting question: are there differences between what is popular in different language Wikiepdias? This is measured through the comparing the highest traffic articles at different Wikipedias. The authors chose four Wikipedias: German, English, Spanish and French. The authors have used an open source software for the analysis (the paper and the software page are not clear whether it was developed for this project). Using this software the authors obtained 65 most popular articles from 6 random months of 2009. The authors then divided the pages into categories: Entertainment (ENT), Current Issues (CUR), Politics and War (POL), and Geography (GEO), Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Science (SCI) and Arts and Humanities (ART), Sexuality (SEX). The authors have compiled two tables, the first showing that there are some major differences between the popularity of articles on different Wikipedias. For example entertainment topics form 45% of popular articles on English Wikipedia, but only 16% on Spanish, where in turn the science articles form 24% (compared to only 3% on English). The second table compares the most contributed to content, again noting significant differences between different Wikipedias, as well as suggesting a lack of a major relation between content's area popularity and number of contributors.

Unfortunately, the paper suffers from a number of issues. The authors noted that the division of articles into categories had to be done manually, but the paper does not describe how this was accomplished (this reviewer can't but wonder how did the author deal with classification of an article that would fit more than one category, for example); nor is there any appendix which would list the articles in question. Given the rather surprising findings (which the authors themselves call "most remarkable", and this reviewer would agree that they can raise an eyebrow), this methodological omission unfortunately raises some issues about the reliability of the research done. A number of similar issues plague the paper; for example the tables also contain a "MAIN" category that is not explained anywhere in the paper. The paper does not discuss any potential biases or issues, such as how the results may not be representative of cultural traits, but of short term media news coverage; or why the data was limited only to few months in 2009 and how this could've affected our ability to generalize from it. There may be, for example, seasonal patterns of interests in certain topics; for example, one could hypothesize that science topics would receive more visits during the school year than holiday months; and if holiday months are different in sampled countries, this could be a factor in the popularity of science topics. (On a sidenote, this reviewer would also like to point out that his own paper is cited totally out of context by the authors).

Overall, such exploratory research is certainly valuable, but the authors stop short of any significant analysis of data, in fact noting themselves that the presented data would benefit from a deeper sociological or sociocultural analysis. Unfortunately, there is no indication that their data set has been made publicly available. Nonetheless, despite lack of significant analysis, and methodological issues, the authors' findings are quite intriguing, suggesting that there may be a much more significant difference in coverage of topics by different language Wikipedias than most have suspected so far. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:34, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for July 2013 edition
Hmmm, not seeing anything that is 100% up my alley but one item:

http://library.iated.org/view/AIBAR2013WIK (abstract, book chapter). Aibar, E., Lerga, M., Lladós, J., Meseguer, A., Minguillón, J. (2013). Wikipedia in Higher Education: an Empirical Study on Faculty Perceptions and Practices. In:  Proceedings of the EDULEARN13 Conference. The International Association for Technology, Education and Development (IATED). ISBN. 978-84-616-3822-2

This sounds interesting, I could try to review it but where's the full text? If I get it within 24h I can try to read and review it. Are you going to be at WikiSym/Mania? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:02, 28 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I was wondering about the same - it seems it's only available as part of a book which is sold in offline digital form, on a CD-ROM for 180 Euros. A quite peculiar form of publication. In cases where it's so difficult to obtain the paper it seems OK to quote from the abstract only. I'm going to be at WikiSym and Wikimania, yes, how about you? Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Yep, I will be there too. If there are any sessions you'd like to recommend, let me know, I've plenty of free time, as I am not presenting anything :> And let's do lunch or dinner :) --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:08, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Here you go, reviewing. I hope I am not too harsh, feel free to moderate me down. The authors investigate why the Polish Wikipedia community of Administrators is growing slower than expected, as defined in a decrease in successful RfAs in Polish Wikipedia. The paper presents a useful lit review of related academic work on RfA, a worthy read for all interested in this topic, and is a welcome study of the under-researched population of editors at non-English Wikipedias. Unfortunately the lit review is not tied very strongly to the rest of the paper, which is tied to a major flow of the article: it would've been stronger if the authors engaged with more social science theory, such as the iron law of oligarchy. Unfortunately this conference paper seems to focus more on the computer science dimension, with a developed statistics section and little theory discussion.

The authors suggest at first such a decline may occur because administrators are chosen based on acquaintance, thus creating a closed group to which people without right connections cannot enter. Later, they conclude that this is unlikely, instead pointing to growing expectations about new candidates. Both of those would be valid hypotheses, but neither is clearly tied to any theory or previous study. (Neither does the paper contain any hypothesis descried as such). The author's analysis of the data is problematic; at one point they contradict themselves noting that "[One of the observed phenomena] could indicate, however, that the community is closing up after all" although later their conclusion states "Our conclusion is that it cannot be claimed with certainty that the Polish Wikipedia community is closing up.".

The authors also misunderstand how the WP:RFA process works on English Wikipedia, nothing that one of the key differences between Polish and English Wikipedia is voting, as in "in the case of English version of Wikipedia, new administrators are elected not by voting, but by discussion". That the authors are ready to take such policy claims at face value does cast a little doubt on the applicability of their findings.

Overall, the paper presents some interesting statistical data on trends in an understudied community, and contributes to our understanding of the governance of Wikipedia. The analysis of the received data is however rather lacking, particularly through weak ties to literature on leadership, volunteer's motivation and related social science areas. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 18:08, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Have you seen...
The discussion at User talk:Mdennis (WMF)? Apparently you're the right person to talk to about that sort of thing so I'd be interested in your thoughts. I'm especially interested to know if the WMF has done any surveys concerning what editor's views on communications are, and if so, what the WMF is doing about the results. If not, why not? It seems obvious to me that communications issues have been behind many of the problems with recent roll outs and so is something the WMF should be looking at but I don't see any sign of you doing so - although of course, and somewhat ironically, you may be but you're not communicating it well. Dpmuk (talk) 19:28, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for August 2013 edition

 * Snyder, J. (2013). Wikipedia in the Academic Environment: Faculty and Student Perspectives. International Journal on E-Learning, 12(3), 303-327. Chesapeake, VA: AACE. http://www.editlib.org/p/38424 (paywalled)
 * I would like to review it but I don't have the access
 * Project talk: Coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects
 * The paper finds that depending on activity and size of a WikiProject, different methods and theoretical perspectives may be applicable. While most research has focused so far on the most active WikiProjects, those are usally much larger and much more formally organized than most. A typical WikiProject will have only a few active members, and is very loosely (what this reviewer would describe as adhocratically) organized. The official membership lists are often misleading, as some significant contributors may not even be official "members". The authors dispute some previous findings suggesting that members prefer to work with other members, finding there's little to no bias in members responding to request by non-members. The authors also find that may WikiProjects are also organized in a fashion similar to many small FLOSS projects.
 * 
 * The authors tested an interesting hypothesis: that inclusion of scholarly references in Wikipedia affects the citation trends for those references. The authors do not reach conclusive findings. While the citations to Wikipedia references increase, they do not do so significantly more than for articles which are not cited on Wikipedia. The authors do note, however, that Wikipedia will often list highly cited articles in its references.
 * I also left a few short comments in the pad

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:43, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for September 2013 edition
re:

The authors make a rather serious claim: "We find a surprisingly large number of editors who change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status." This reviewer does not find it shocking, as he has written about this problem years ago. The authors note that those editors are difficult to understand based on their pattern of edits, but are more easily spotted by analyzing the pattern of votes at RfA, through they also suggest that a relatively simple fix may be helpful - simply increase the threshold of success votes required for a successful RfA may increase the quality of the Wikipedia admin corps.

One may however quibble with "enforcement of neutrality is in the hands of comparatively few, powerful administrators", another attention-drawing claim in the abstract, that however finds little discussion or support in the body. Discussions about NPOV topics are hardly limited to mop'n'bucket wielders, and thus this claim, and the article abstract, may be exaggerating the importance of the findings. Some admins wait until getting the nearly-impossible-to-remove mop before becoming, well, regular editors. As long as they are not abusing their powers - this reviewer is not sure why should we care. What is more relevant, certainly, is how this entire process shows the inefficiency of the RfA, which forces people to hide behind false "I am perfect" personas, as any sign of being a real person (i.e. making errors, being human, etc.) is often enough to threaten to derail that process. Still, this review is not a place for beating that nearly dead horse - but those interested in the RfA reform process should likely read this article in more detail.


 * Thanks, Piotrus - I moved both over to the draft page, but I think the above review could still use some more detail about the paper's methodology and results, even if its provocative title merits some kind of counterpoint. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:42, 25 September 2013 (UTC)



This is a new paper in the emerging subfield of "academics and educators attitudes on Wikipedia", which we have covered before (links). This paper benefits from a respectable sample (about 800 respondents from the faculty body of the Open University of Catalonia). The paper confirms a number of previous finding, namely the importance of one's perception of Wikipedia usefulness and quality, which is significantly and positively correlated to whether one will consider using it as a teaching resource. Correspondingly, poor knowledge about Wikipedia in particular and open access and collaborative knowledge creation models in general are negatively correlated with the views on Wikipedia. Having an respected figure (role model) using Wikipedia in teaching is also likely to influence others, through the usual informal peer networks. Individual characteristics (academic rank, teaching experience, age or gender) are not seen as significant. As the authors conclude, there is much work to be done in educating the worlds of education and academia about the basics of Wikipedia - something we should never take for granted.



Still no access, so not much I can do. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:40, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Book review
Done at User:Piotrus/Sandbox/Notes but I'd suggest waiting with the publication until the English version is at least available for pre-orders at Amazon. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:53, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for October 2013 edition

 * This is a poster. Interesting findings: 47% of the 32 surveyed volunteers were currently working in a health-related field (mainly as clinicians); among the rest students; and individuals with health problems formed significant groups.Motivations were divided into helping, education, a sense of professional responsiblity, fulfilment, and support for wikipedia mission. Conflict with and hostility from other editros was identified as a factor that negatively affects motivations.

Left some other comments in the pad; not seeing any paper I can review more extensively this month. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:49, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for November 2013 edition

 * 

"Google loves Wikipedia". Why? And how about other search engines? This is the question posed by this study, an updated version of research covered in Singpost previously (Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Recent research). Back then, only an abstract of the paper was available; now a draft paper can be accessed. Han-Teng Liao presents interesting data backing up his claim that neither Google nor Wikipedia are unique, rather we are seeing a more generic rule that "search engines favor user-generated encyclopedias". His study's valuable contribution, beside methodology, is the data from the Chinese Internet, through as he notes we need further research on "the cases of Russia (where Yandex dominates) and South Korea (where Naver and other dominate)".

Not seeing anything else that jumps right out at me... --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:14, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Piotrus, thanks, I added it to the draft and made some edits to it. Quite a few other papers have been added to the Etherpad in the meantime; let me know if there is anything of interest for you. Also, we still have your Etherpad notes about the DiStaso survey which so far no one got to organize into a proper writeup yet. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 04:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)


 * 

In light of the recent increase in for-hire editing on Wikipedia, often carried out by PR professionals (link related Signpost article), comes another (link previous related research reported here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012-04-30#Wikipedia_in_the_eyes_of_PR_professionals?) timely study. This works examines how familiar the PR professionals (working not only for for-protit organizations,but also for non-profits, educational institutions, government institutions, and others)) are with Wikipedia rules, based on two surveys (from 2012 and 2013). 74% of respondents noted that their institution had a Wikipedia article, a significant (5%) increase over the 2012 survey, through over 50% of the PR professionals do not monitor those articles more often than on quarterly basis. The study confirms that there is a steady but slow increase in direct edits to Wikipedia by PR professionals; 40% of the 2013 survey respondents hadengaged with Wikipedia through editing (with about a quarter of the respondents editing talk pages, and the reminder, directly editing the main space content), compared to 35% of the 2012 survey respondents. Over 60% agree that "editing Wikipedia for a client or company is a common practice". While "posing as someone else to make changes in Wikipedia" is not seen a a common practice, it is nonetheless supported by ~15% of respondents in the USA, and almost 30% elsewhere (through the latter number should be taken tentatively, as 97% of the survey respondents came from the US).

At the same time, approximately two thirds of the respondents do not know of or understand Wikipedia rules on COI/PR and related topics (defined in this study as Wales' 2012 "Bright Line" policy proposal, linked to his comment in a Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) from January 10, 2012, 5:56 am, 2012 (editorial note: can we get a permlink to a Facebook comment?)). Of those who had experience editing Wikipedia directly, thus breaking the rule, over a third (36%) did so knowing about it, thus knowingly violating the site's policy.

The significant breadth of ignorance about Wikipedia rules reinforces the point that even a decade after Wikipedia's creation, most of its users do not even realize that it is a project "anyone can edit", much less what it means: 71% respondents replied that they simply "don't know" "How Wikipedia articles about their clients or companies are started" question, which presumably indicates that they do not understand the basic function and capabilities of the article history function. Majority of other respondents (24% total) admit to writing it themselves; 3% hired a PR firm specializing in this task, 1% hired a "Wikipedia firm" (a concept unfortunately not defined in the article), and only 2% note that they "made a request through Request Article Page"). When it comes to existing articles, only 21% of the respondents wait for the public; vast majority of the rest makes edits themselves, with 5% outsourcing this to a specialized PR or "Wikipedia firm".

Respondent s who had directly edited Wikipedia for their company or client said their edits typically “stick” most of the time. Over three quarters noted that their changes stick half the time of more often; only 8% said they never stick, always being reverted. This raises the question about the efficiency of Wikipedia COI-detection practices, as well as of their desirability (are we not reverting those changes because we don't realize they are COI-based, or are they reviewed and left alone as net-positive edits?).

60% of the respondents note that the articles about their clients or companies have factual errors they would like to correct; many observed that potentially reputation-harming errors last for many months, or even years. This statistic poses an interesting question about Wikipedia responsibility to the world: by denying PR people the ability to correct such errors, aren't we hurting our own mission?

Majority of respondents were not satisfied with existing Wikikipedia rules, feeling that the community treats PR professionals unfairly, denying them equal rights in participation; even out of the respondents who tried to follow Wikipedia policies and who raised concerns on article's talk page rather than directly editing them, 10% percents noted that they had to wait weeks to get any response, and 13% said they never received a response.

With regards to the new editors experience, it is also interesting to note that only a quarter of PR professionals felt that making edits was easy, majority complained that editing Wikipedia is time consuming or even "nearly impossible".

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:49, 25 November 2013 (UTC)


 * 

The study, based on Wikia wikis, rather than WMF projects (but with significant implication for them as well) found support for the claims that the iron law of oligarchy holds in wikis; i.e. that the wiki transparent and egalitarian models does not prevent the most active contributors from obtaining significant and disproportionate control over those projects. In particular, the study found that as wiki communities grow 1) theys are less likely to add new administrators; 2) the number of edits made by administrators to administrative “project” pages will increase and 3) the number of edits made by experienced contributors that are reverted by administrators also grows. The authors also note that while there are some interesting exceptions to this rule, proving that wikis can, on occasion, function and egalitarian, democratic public spaces, on average "as wikis become larger and more complex, a small group – present at the beginning – will restrict entry into positions of formal authority in the community and account for more administrative activity while using their authority to restrict contributions from experienced community members".

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:05, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Recent research
Tilman, nice coverage in the Signpost. Tony  (talk)  13:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for December 2013 edition

 * This paper, written by one of the pioneers of peer production/collaborative intelligence research, Yochai Benkler, and his students, discusses some of the developments in this field, using Wikipedia as one of several case studies. The paper, in essence, is a literature review of the fields of "organization, motivation, and quality" of peer production. [may add more to this] --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 16:30, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks Piotrus, added it to the draft, with some edits (e.g. they are not, strictly speaking, his students). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-25/Recent research
No idea if regular editors can edit the Signpost but shouldn't "cought" be "caught"? -- Neil N  <sup style="color:blue;">talk to me  05:34, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I fixed it. Feel free to correct such obvious typos directly (see also the last sentence at Wikipedia Signpost/About). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:39, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

My paper
My paper on teaching with Wikipedia and academia's attitude to that idea was just published at. I obviously cannot review it myself... :) Cheers, --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 15:47, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, tweeted it and added it to this month's list. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for February 2014 edition

 * review of
 * The authors study rationales used by participants in deletion discussions, in the larger context of democratic online deliberation. The authors reviewed in detail deletion discussion of the total of 229 articles listed for deletion on three dates, one of them being January 15th, 2012, the day of the SOPA initiative. The authors looked into whether this event would influence rationales of the deletion discussions and their outcome. They also reviewed, in less detail, a number of other deletions from around the time of the SOPA protest. The authors display a good knowledge of relevant literature, including that in the field of Wikipedia studies, presenting an informative literature review section.

Overall, the authors find that the overall quality of the discussions is high, as most of the participants display knowlededge of Wikipedia's policy, particularly on the notability and credibility (or what we would more likely refer to as reliability) of the articles whose deletion is considered. In re, notability far outweighs the second most frequent rationale, credibility (reliability). They confirm that the deletion system works as intended, with decisions made by majority voters.

Interestingly, the authors find that Wcertain topics did tend to trigger more deletion outcomes, said topics being articles about people, for-profit organizations, and definitions. The authors in turn observe that "locations or events are more likely to be kept than expected, and articles about nonprofit organizations and media are more likely to be suggested for other options (e.g., merge, redirect, etc.) than expected". Discussions about people and for-profit organizations were more likely to be unanimous than expected, whereas articles about nonprofit organizations, certain locations, or events were more likely to lead to a nonunanimous discussion. Regarding the SOPA protests influence on deletion debates, the authors find a small and short-lived increase in keep decisions, and tentatively attribute this to editors being impacted by the idea of internet freedom and consequently allowing free Internet publishing.

The authors sum up those observation noting that "the community members of Wikipedia have clear standards for judging the acceptability of a biography or commercial organization article; and such standards are missing or less clear when it comes to the topics on location, event, or nonprofit organization... Thus, one suggestion to the Wikipedia community is to make the criteria of judging these topics more clear or specific with examples, so it will alleviate the ambiguity of the situation.". This reviewer, as a participant of a not insignificant number of deletion discussions as well as those about the associated policies, agrees with said statement. With regards to the wider scheme, the authors conclude that the AfD process is an example of "a democratic deliberation process interested in maintaining information quality in Wikipedia".

Note to TB: it would be nice to link Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions somewhere, perhaps? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:13, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Piotrus, thanks! Ported it over. But could you double-check that the paper refers to January 15, 2012 regarding the SOPA initiative? The actual blackout was on January 18, not January 15. Also, I seem to recall that editing was basically deactivated during the blackout. Feel free to make changes directly in the draft.
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 14:48, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Good point, fixed and clarified there. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:26, 27 February 2014 (UTC)


 * reviewing

The author reviews the linguistic conceptualisation of feminity on (English) Wikipedia, with regards to whether language used to refer to women differs depending on the type of articles it is used in. Specifically, the author analyzed the use of five lexemes (a term which in the context of this study means words): ladylike, girly, girlish, feminine and womanly. The findings confirm that the usage of those terms in non-accidental. The word feminine, most commonly used of of the studied five, correlates primarily to the topics of fashion, sexuality, and to a lesser extent, culture, society and female historical biographies. The second most popular is the word womanly, which in turn correlates with topics of female artists, religion and history. Girlish, the fourth most popular world, correlates most strongly with the biographies of males, as well as with the articles on movies & TV, female entertainers, literature and music. Finally, girly and ladylike, respectively 3rd and 5th in terms of popularity, cluster together and correlate to topics such as movies & TV (animated), Japanese culture, art, tobacco and female athletes. Later, the author also suggests that there is a not insignificant overlap in usage between cluster for girlish and the combined cluster for giry and ladylike. The author concludes that there are three or four different conceptualisations of feminity on Wikipedia, which in more simple terms means, to quote the author, that "people do indeed represent women in different ways when talking about different things [on Wikipedia]", with "girly and girlish having a somewhat frivolous undertone and womanly, feminine and ladylike being of a more serious and reserved nature".

The study does suffer from a few issues: a literature review could be more comprehensive (the paper cites only six works, and not a single one of them from the field of Wikipedia studies), and this reviewer did not find sufficient justification for why the author limited himself to the analysis of only 500 occurrences (total) of the five lexemes analyzed. A futher discussion of how the said 500 cases were selected would likely strengthen the paper.


 * Note to TB: the graph on p.15 is actually pretty nice; can we use it under fair use? If not, perhaps we can make some mention of it; it cannot be linked directly, I am afraid.
 * 2nd note: I think the following is significant, but I am finding it hard to translate from jargon. Perhaps you could develop this: "The author also concludes that the actual person or thing referred to (the referent) "itself does not play a part in the determination of the lexeme and concept, in this case, the variables after which the lexeme is chosen proved to be purely grammatical, separating the attributive from the predicative usages of the adjectives". I've tried to rewrite it, but form the quoted part it's, well, a quote.

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:17, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

You've got mail!
Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:11, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for March 2014 edition

 * reviewing Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia: A Systemic-Constructivist Analysis
 * In this study of knowledge construction on Wikipedia, the authors focus on the importance of the social system and social structure in influencing the actions of individuals (Wikipedia editors). They analyze the edit history of the German Wikipedia article on Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, arguing that it is a case study of "a regularly occurring situation: the development of new knowledge in a large-scale social setting based on inconsistent information under uncertainty." The author provide an interesting literature review of what they term a "systemic-constructivist" approach, then discuss the evolution of the Wikipedia article through about 1,200 edits, noting the importance of Wikipedia policies, which were often quoted by the editors. The authors also conduced a survey among the editors of the article to obtain additional information. The authors also asked independent experts to review the article; this review concluded that the German Wikipedia article is of high quality. They note that the experts identified some errors, although unfortunately they do not provide details specific enough for the community to address them. They conclude that the Wikipedia editors were not experts in the field of nuclear power plants, yet were able to produce an article that earned favorable reviews from such experts; this, according to the authors, can be explained through the "systemic-constructivist" approach as validating the importance of the social system and structure of Wikipedia, which guided the amateur editors into producing an expert-level product.
 * --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:25, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * regarding, I think this is just a power-point presentation; hence all we need is in the abstract. Notes and slides don't seem to contribute that much, through they are useful to have overall. Something like:
 * A survey of information literacy librarians shows that they provide little Wikipedia instruction, with about 40% of respondents answering that their schools provide no instruction on Wikipedia, and 80%, that they hold no dedicated workshops. Still, the remaining group - 60% which do provide some instruction, and 20% who hold dedicated workshops, suggest that the picture is not so dire, and in fact illuminates an interesting opportunity for reaching out with regards to the Wikipedia Education Programs, which do not usually focus on the libraries instructional programs. Only 3% of respondents indicated that they have students actually edit Wikipedia, and one cited story, about "making edits to lower the quality of an article" and "getting a student blocked", raises a specter of similar incidents in the past, as well as a question of ethics in education with regards to purposefully engaging in vandalism for educational purposes [we could probably link to a past story in Signpost, but I cannot find them right now...] Unsurprisingly, there was also a negative correlation between librarian's age and views on Wikipedia. Although overall majority of respondents were supportive of the idea that librarians need to educate students in digital literacy skills, they were nonetheless opposed to linking Wikipedia from the pages of their institutions. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:45, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for April 2014 edition

 * review of

This study examined academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and open-access journals for academic publishing through a survey of 120 academics carried out in late 2011 and early 2012. This study comes from the same authors who published a similar paper in 2012, reviewed here, which suffered from the a major basic fallacy: Wikipedia is not the place to publish original research academic work. The authors, unfortunately, seem to seem to ignore no original research policy when they write: "There are in general three models in the current movement towards open-access academic publishing: pushing traditional journals towards open access by changing policies; creating open-access journals; and using existing online open-access venue Wikipedia" and "we surveyed academics to understand their perspectives on using Wikipedia for academic publishing in comparison with open-access journals". In the final discussion segment, the authors do acknowledge the existence of the OR policy, where they suggest that certain types or academic papers (reviews) are similar enough to Wikipedia articles that integration of such articles into Wikipedia could be feasible. The authors do provide a valuable literature review noting prior works which analyze the peer review system in Wikipedia, perceptions of Wikipedia in academia, and related issues (through said review is partially split between the introduction and discussion section).

The study provide some interesting findings regarding academics view of benefits of Wikipedia-style peer review and publishing. Most respondents (77 percent) reported reading Wikipedia, and a rather high number (43 percent) reported having made at least one edit, with 15 percent having written an article. Interestingly, as many as four respondents stated that they were "credited for time spent reviewing Wikipedia articles related to their academic careers" in their professional workplaces. The more experience one had with Wikipedia, the more likely one would see advantages in the wiki publishing model. Most common advantages listed were "cost reductions (40 percent), timely review (19 percent), post-publication corrections (52 percent), making articles available before validation (27 percent) and reaching a wider audience (8 percent)." Disadvantages included questionable stability (86 percent), absence of integration with libraries and scholarly search engines (55 percent), lower quality (43 percent), less credibility (57 percent), less academic acceptance (78 percent) and less impact on academia (56 percent).

With regards to Wikipedia peer review, 54 percent of respondents were aware that Wikipedia had a peer-review process and about third of these considered it to be less rigorous than that of scholarly journals; none of the respondents demonstrated any significant experience with the specifics of how Wikipedia articles are reviewed, suggesting that their involvement with the Wikipedia is rather limited. 75% of the survey respondents did not feel comfortable having others edit their papers-in-progress, and over 25% expressed concern about the lack of control over changes made post-publications. Majority of respondents did not also feel comfortable with their work being reviewed by Wikipedians, with the most common concern being unknown qualifications of Wikipedia editors and reviewers.

Perhaps of most value to the Wikipedia community is the analysis of suggestions made by the respondents with regards to making Wikipedia more accepted at the universities. Here, the most common suggestion was “making the promoted peer-reviewed articles searchable from university libraries” and in general, making it more easy to find and identify high quality articles (some functionality as displaying the quality assessment of an article in mainspace already exists in MediaWiki but is implemented as opt-in feature only).

The authors conclude that the academic researchers’ increased familiarity with either open access publishing or wiki publishing is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment and professional status. Overall, this study seems like a major improvement over the authors prior 2012 paper, and a valuable paper addressing the topics of the place of Wikipedia in the open publishing movement and the relationship between Wikipedia and academia.

Done with this one, feel free to copyedit. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:36, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Brief review of


 * The authors analyze the readership patterns of English and Chinese Wikipedias, with a focus on what type of articles are most popular in the "an English speaking or Chinese speaking time-zone". The authors used all Wikipedia pages which existed in both languages in the period of 1st June 2012 to the 14th October 2012 for their study, coding them through the OpenCalais with an estimated 2.6% error rate.

The authors find that readers of English and Chinese Wikipedia from time zones of high Chinese activity browse different categories of pages. Chinese readers visit English Wikipedia about Asian culture (in particular, Japanese and Korean pop culture), as well as about mobile communications and networking technologies. The authors also find that English pages are almost ten times as popular as Chinese pages (through their results are not identifying users by nationality directly, rather focusing on time zone analysis).

In this reviewers opinion, the study suffers from major methodological problems that are serious enough to cast all the findings in doubt. The authors find that only 7603 pages were eligible to be analyzed (had both English and Chinese version), however the Chinese Wikipedia in the studied period had approximately half a million articles; and while many don't have English equivalents yet, to expect that less than 2% did seems rather dubious. Similarly, our own WikiProject China estimates that English Wikipedia has at almost 50,000 China-related articles. That, given that WikiProject assessments are often underestimating the number of relevant topics, and usually don't cover many core topics, suggests that the study missed a vast majority of articles that exist in both languages. It is further unclear how "an English speaking or Chinese speaking time-zone" were operationalized. The authors do not reveal how, if at all, they controlled for the fact that readers of English Wikipedia can also come from countries were English is not a native language, and that there are hundreds of millions of people outside China who live in the five time zones that span China, which overlap with India, half of Russia, Korea and major parts of Southeast Asia. As such, the findings of that study can be more broadly interpreted as "readership patterns of English and Chinese Wikipedia in Asia and the the world, with regards to a small subset of pages that exist both on English and Chinese Wikipedia."

--not done, but not sure if I can continue today... the article is not written very clearly, I am still surprised what get published. Can you figure out if this article studied people from non-Chinese time zones and how did the authors try to control for people such as those from other East Asian countries? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:59, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Done, this article IMHO is a mess. Perhaps a 2nd reviewer could try to temper this down, but IMHO this does not warrants any publication. Not that it was published, I think, it was a conference paper at "WWW Companion '14 Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd international conference on World wide web companion" .--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:32, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for May 2014 edition

 * Let me remind you the second entry from April's hasn't been published.


 * :
 * A librarian at the University of Pittsburgh discusses how two undergraduate interns have added over 100 links to library collections to Wikipedia articles, which led to the increase use of the library's digitized collections. An experienced Wikipedian, Sage Ross, provided help with this project. The two undergrads expanded or created approximately 100 articles, mainly related to the History of Pittsburgh (such as Pittsburgh Courier or Pittsburgh Playhouse), using resources hosted by the university's libraries as sources or external links.The paper also provides a valuable overview of similar initiatives in the past (SOME OF WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN COVERED IN SIGNPOST BEFORE, IF SO PLEASE LINK). Majority of reviewed examples suggest that linking library resources from Wikipedia pages increase their visibility, and this study reached the same conclusion with regards to their project, which led both the improvement of Wikipedia content and of driving more traffic to the digital resources hosted by the library. This reviewer applauds this project as a model one, through it would benefit from a list of all articles edited by the students (which were not tagged on their talk pages with any expected template, such as educational assignment). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 05:37, 28 May 2014 (UTC)


 * 
 * This paper compares aspects of Wikipedia and South Korean Naver's Naver Knowledge service (NOT SURE IF THIS IS THE SAME AS Knowledge Search ARTICLE WE HAVE?) similar to Google Questions and Answers. This is a topic of some interest, as South Korea is praised for being one of the most Internet-integrated societies in the world, while at the same time Korean Wikipedia currently holding the rank of 23rd largest, is less developed than those of a number of smaller countries less commonly seen as Internet powers, (consider List of Wikipedias by size). The researchers surveyed 132 Korean Internet users of those services, through they do not make it clear if all members of the sample were in fact registered contributors to both services, instead describing them as "relative active users of the CI [collective intelligence] system". Unfortunately, parts of the paper, including the survey questions, appear to have been translated using machine translation, and are thus difficult to interpret correctly. Overall, the authors find that there were no significant differences with regards to the respondents views of Naver Knowledge and Wikipedia services. One of the statistically significant results suggest that Korean contributors of collective intelligence services find the Naver Knowledge service easier to use than Wikipedia, through the differences do not appear to be major (73.5% to 60.9% Korean contributors found Naver Knowledge and Wikipedia easy to work with, respectively). One of the conclusion of the paper is the importance of making user interface as easy as possible, and making it easier for the users to add and edit audiovisual content (through the authors seem not aware of and do not discuss the Visual Editor). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  07:07, 28 May 2014 (UTC)


 * 
 * This is another major literature review of the field of Wikipedia studies, brought forward by the authors whose prior work on this topic was reviewed in Signpost before (Okoli, C., Mehdi, M., Mesgari, M., Nielsen, F., & Lanamäki, A. (2012, October 24). The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia. SSRN Scholarly Paper, Montreal. Retrieved February 18, 2013, from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2021326 - LINK TO SINPOST/WIR ARCHIVE HERE). This time the authors focus on a fragment of the larger body of works about Wikipedia, analyzing 99 works published up to June 2011 on the theme of "Wikipedia readership" - in other words focusing on the theme "What do we know about people who read Wikipedia". The overview focuses less on demographic analysis (since little research has been done in that area), and more on perceptions of Wikipedia by surveyed groups of readers. Their findings include, among other, a conclusion that "Studies have found that articles generally related to entertainment and sexuality top the list, covering over 40% of visits", and in more serious topics, it is a common source for health and legal information. They also find that "a very large number of academicians in fact have quite positive, if nuanced, perceptions of Wikipedia’s value." They also observe that the most commonly studied group has been that of students, who offer a convenience sample. The authors finish by identifying a number of contradictory findings and topics in need of further research, and conclude that existing studies have likely overestimated the extent to which Wikipedia's reader are cautious about the site's credibility. Finally, the authors offer valuable thoughts in the "implications for the Wikipedia community" section, such suggesting "incorporating one or more of the algorithms for computational estimation of the reliability of Wikipedia articles that have been developed to help address credibility concerns", in a move similar to the establishment of the Article Feedback Tool, already accepted by the community. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:55, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for June 2014 edition

 * (was not in the scratchpad?)

A survey of research skills of a group of students at an Australian institution showed that purposeful engaging with Wikipedia, including contributing to it, improved their academic skillset.

[short entry, but the topic is pretty straightforward]


 * (article)/ (thesis) (- related webpage, video

This article describes IntelWiki, a set of MediaWiki tools designed to facilitate new editor's engagement by making research easier. The tool "automatically generates resource recommendations, ranks the references based on the occurrence of salient keywords, and allows users to interact with the recommended references within the Wikipedia editor." The researchers find that volunteers using this tool were more productive, contributing more high quality text. The studied group was composed of sixteen editors with no prior Wikipedia editing experience, who completed two editing tasks in a sandbox wiki, one using a mockup Wikipedia editing interface and Google search engine, and using the IntelWiki interface and reference search engine. The reference suggestion tool developed by the author seems valuable, unfortunately this reviewer was unable to locate any proof that the developer engaged Wikipedia community, or made his code or the tool publicly available for further testing. Further, the research and the thesis does not discuss the differences between their MediaWiki clone and Wikipedia in any significant details. Based on the limited description available, the study's overall conclusions may not be very reliable, as the mockup Wikipedia interface used for comparison seems to be a default MediaWiki clone, lacking many Wikipedia-specific tools; therefore the theme of comparing IntelWiki to Wikipedia is a bit misleading. Overall, while the study is interesting, it is disappointing that the main purpose of this appears to be completing a thesis, with little thought given to actually improving Wikipedia (by developing public tools and/or releasing open code).

Till: please check Village_pump_(miscellaneous) for any developments, I may have limited net access next week. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:13, 22 June 2014 (UTC)


 * 

This paper explores the use of Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike encyclopedia by Chinese microblog (Twitter, Sina Weibo) users through qualitative and quantitative analyses of Chinese microblog postings. Both encyclopedias are often cited by microblog users, and are highly popular in China to the extent that the words wiki band baidu became verbs meaning to look up content on respective websites, serving as the verb "to google" in contemporary English. One of the study's major focus is the impact of Internet censorship in China; particularly as Wikipedia is not censored - but access to it, and it's discussion in most Chinese websites may be, and in turn Baidu Baike is both censored and more likely to host copyright violating content (thus making it more informative to the vast majority of Internet users not caring about legal technicalities). Despite Baidu Baike copyright violating content, many users still prefer uncensored and more reliable Chinese Wikipedia, through can get frustrated by not being able to access it due to censorship. Whether some Wikipedia content is censored or not is seen by some as a measure of the topic's political sensitivity. The author also suggests that there certain distinguishing characteristic can be observed between groups which prefer one encyclopedia over the other, but does not discuss this in detail, suggesting a very interesting further research avenue. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:46, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

[saving draft]

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for July 2014 edition

 * http://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/319 /Building academic literacy and research skills by contributing to Wikipedia: A case study at an Australian university
 * It is refreshing to see a continuing and growing stream of academic works endorsing various aspects of teaching with Wikipedia paradigm. The following study of eleven students "enrolled in a semester-long academic literacy course in a preparatory program for study at an Australian university... showed an educationally statistical improvement in the students’ research skills, while qualitative comments revealed that despite some technical difficulties in using the Wikipedia site, many students valued the opportunity to write for a ‘real’ audience and not just for a lecturer." (The abstract says it all in this case...)


 * http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/hanteng/2014/06/20/chinese-academic-search-engine/
 * This is an interesting exploratory overview of a Chinese language research on Wikipedia. The findings suggest that Chinese-language scholars and academic publication outlets are increasingly doing research in the field of Wikipedia studies; however there's "a divide between mainland Chinese academic sources/search results on one hand, and Hong Kong/Taiwanese ones on the other." The reason for this seems to be primarily technical, as scholars from different regions seem to publish in different outlets, which in turn are not indexed in the academic search engines preferred by those from other region.


 * http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~mounia/Papers/wiki.pdf / Reader Preferences and Behavior on Wikipedia
 * This research deals with the under-studied population of Wikipedia readers. The paper provides a useful literature review on the few studies about reading preference of that group. The researchers used publicly available page view data, and more interestingly, were able to obtain browsing data (such as time spend by a reader on a given page). Since such data is unfortunately not collected by Wikipedia, the researchers obtained this data through volunteers using a Yahoo! toolbar. The authors used Assessment classes to gauge article's quality.
 * The paper offers valuable findings, including important insights to the Wikipedia community, namely that "the most read articles do not necessarily correspond to those frequently edited, suggesting some degree of non-alignment between user reading preferences and author editing preference". This is not a finding that should come as much surprise, considering for example the high percentage of quality military history articles produced by the WikiProject Military History, one of the most active if not the most active wikiproject in existence - and of how little importance this topic is to the general population. Statistics on topics popularity and quality of corresponding articles can be seen in Table 1, page 3 of the article (TB NOTE TO EDITOR: Could we use a fair use image of this table? I think it's very interesting). Figure 1 on page 4 is also of interest, presenting a matrix of articles grouped by popularity and length. For example, the authors identify area of "technology" as the 4th most popular, but the quality of articles in it lags behind many other fields, placing it around the 9th place. It would be a worthwhile exercise for the Wikipedia community to identify popular articles that are in need of more attention (through revitalizing tools like Popular pages, perhaps using code that makes WikiProject popular pages listing work?) and direct more attention towards what our readers want to read about (rather than what we want to write about). Finally, the authors also identify different reading patterns, and suggest how those can be used to analyze article's popularity in more detail.
 * Overall, this article seems like a very valuable piece of research for the Wikipedia community and WMF, and it underscores why we should reconsider collecting more data on our readers behavior. In order to serve our readers as best as we can, more information on their browsing habits on Wikipedia could help to produce more valuable research like this project.


 * http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681314000834 / Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 * This paper, written in a very friendly prose (not a common finding among academic works), looks at Wikipedia (as well as some other forms of collaborative, Web 2.0 media) from the business perspective of a public relations/marketing studies. Of particular interest to the Wikipedia community is the authors goal of presenting "the three bases of getting your entry into Wikipedia, as well as a set of guidelines that help manage the potential Wikipedia crisis that might happen one day." The authors correctly recognize that Wikipedia has policies that must be adhered to by any contributors, through a weakness of the paper is that while it discusses Wikipedia concepts such as neutrality,notability, verifiability of the conflict of interest it doe not link to them. The paper provides a set of practical advice on how to get one's business entry on Wikipedia, or how to improve it. While the paper does not suggest anything outright unethical, it is frank to the point of raising some eyebrows. While nobody can disagree with advice sch as "as a rule of thumb, try to remain as objective and neutral as possible" and "when in doubt, check with others on the talk page to determine whether proposed changes are appropriate", given the lack of consensus among Wikipedia's community on how to deal with for-profit and PR editors, other advice such as "maximize mentions in other Wikipedia entries" (i.e. gaming WP:RED), "be associated with serious contributors...leverage the reputation of an employee who is already a highly active contributor... [befriend Wikipedians in real life]", "When correcting negative information is not possible, try counterbalancing it by adding more positive elements about your firm, as long as the facts are interesting and verifiable", "...you might edit the negative section by replacing numerals (99) with words (ninety-nine), since this is also less likely to be read. Add pictures to draw focus away from the negative content" might be seen as more controversial, falling into the gaming the system gray area. The "Third, get help from friends and family" section in particular seems to fall foul of meatpuppetry.
 * In the end, this is an article worth reading in detail by all interested in the PR/COI topics, through for better or worse, the fact that it is closed access will likely reduce its impact significantly. On an ending note, one of the two article's co-authors has a page on Wikipedia at Andreas Kaplan, which was restored by a newbie editor in 2012, two years after it's deletion, has been maintained by throw-away SPAs, and this reviewer cannot help but notice that it still seems to fail Notability (academics)...

There are few more works I am willing to review but I don't have access to them. If you can get me copies of them, I can work on them.

Oh, feel free to add "review by Piotrus" or such to each and any of my reviews from now on, I support non-anonymous reviewing.


 * I was able to obtain a copy of No praise without effort: experimental evidence on how rewards affect Wikipedia's contributor community. Here's the review:
 * In 2012, the authors have given out over a hundred barnstars to the top 1% most active Wikipedians, and concluded that such awards improve editors productivity. This time they repeated this experiment while broadening their sample size to the top 10% most active editors. After excluding administrators and recently inactive editors, they handed out 300 barntars "with a generic positive text that expressed community appreciation for their contributions", divided between the 91st–95th, 96th–99th, and 100th percentiles of most active editors (this corresponds to an average of 282, 62 and 22 edits per month) and then tracked the activity of those editors, as well as of the corresponding control sample which did not receive any award. The experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that less active contributors will be responsive to rewards, similar to the most highly-active contributors from the prior research.
 * The authors found, however, that rewarding less productive editors did not stimulate higher subsequent productivity. They note that while the top 1% group responded to an award with an increase productivity (measured at a rather high 60% increase), whereas less productive subjects did not change their behavior significantly. The researchers also noted that while some of the top 1% editors received an additional award from other Wikipedians, not a single subject from the less active group was a recipient of another award.
 * The researchers conclude that "this supports the notion that peer production’s incentive structure is broadly meritocratic; we did not observe contributors receiving praise or recognition without having first demonstrated significant and substantial effort." While this will come as little surprise to the Wikipedia community, their other observation - that outside the top 1% of editors, awards such as barnstars have little meaningful impact - is more interesting.
 * Further, the authors found that while rewarding the most active editors tends to increase their retention ratio, it may counter-intuitively decrease the retention ratio of the less active editors. The authors propose the following explanation: "Premature recognition of their work may convey a different meaning to these contributors; instead of signaling recognition and status in the eyes of the community, these individuals may perceive being rewarded as a signal that their contributions are sufficient, for the time being, or come to expect being rewarded for their contributions." They suggest that this could be better understood through future research. For the community in general, it raises an interesting question: how should we recognize less active editors, to make sure that thanking them will not be taken as "you did enough, now you can leave"?

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:07, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Piotrus, thanks for all your work, as always! Regarding your question about fair use: The consensus seems to be that the exceptions for non-free content in WP:NFCC do not extend beyond the mainspace, not even to the Signpost (we had discussions specifically about this question some years ago, should be findable somewhere in the archives of WT:POST).
 * And my apologies that I almost forgot to transfer over your latest contributions, it's been a busy week. You may want to reconsider whether you would like to edit the draft page directly in the future. I know you value the editorial attention that might come with the transfer, but often there unfortunately isn't actually enough time for that, whereas the main draft page might have more eyes on it.
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:57, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for August 2014 edition

 * Please tag my reviews with my name, like the others. Thanks!


 * reviewing
 * Ethnography is often seen as the least quantitative of social science branches, and this essay-like article's style is a good illustration. This is, essentially, a self-reflective story of a Wikipedia research project. The author, an ethnographer, recounts her collaboration with two big data scholars in a project dealing with a large Wikipedia dataset. The results of their collaboration are presented here and have been briefly covered by our Newsletter in Issue 8/13. This article can be seen as an interesting companion to the prior, Wikipedia-focused piece, explaining how it was created, through it fails to answer questions of interest to the community, such as "why did the authors chose Wikipedia as their research ground" or about their experiences (if any) editing Wikipedia.


 * reviewing
 * The authors asked the following research questions: "1) To what extent are scholarly articles referenced in Wikipedia, and what content is particularly likely to be mentioned?" and "2) How do these Wikipedia references correlate with other article-level metrics such as downloads, social media mentions, and citations?". To answer this, the authors analyzed which PLOS articles are referenced on Wikipedia. They found that as of March 2014, about 4% of PLOS articles were mentioned on Wikipedia, which they conclude is "similar to mentions in science blogs or the post-publication peer review service, F1000Prime". About half of articles mentioned on Wikipedia are also mentioned on Facebook, suggesting that being cited on Wikipedia is related to being picked up by other social media. Most of Wikipedia cites come from PLOS Genetics, PLOS Biology and other biology/medicine related PLOS outlets, with PLOS One accounting for only 3% total, through there are indications this is changing over time. Unfortunately, this is very much a descriptive paper, and the authors stop short of trying to explain or predict anything. PS. Since Signpost is not affected by the WP:TRIVIA... "By far the most referenced PLOS article is a study on the evolution of deep-sea gastropods (Welch, 2010) with 1249 references, including 541 in the Vietnamese Wikipedia"

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:19, 26 August 2014 (UTC)


 * reviewing (NOTE: we can use images, they are explicitly licensed under CC BY-SA)
 * It is time for another interesting paper on newcomer retention from the authors with a proven track record of tackling this issue. This time they focus on the Articles for Creation mechanism. The authors conclude that instead of improving the success of newcomers, AfC in fact further decreases their productivity. The authors note that once AfC was fully rolled out around mid-2011, it indeed begun to be widely used - the ratio of newcomers using it went up from <0.05% to ~.25%. At the same time, the percentage of newbie articles surviving on Wikipedia went down from ~25% to ~15%. The authors hypothesize that they AfC process is unfriendly to the newcomers due to the following issues: 1) it is too slow, and 2) it hides drafts from potential collaborators.

The authors find that the AfC review process is not subject to insurmountable delays; they conclude that "most drafts will be submitted for review quickly and that reviews will happen in a timely manner.". In fact, 2/3 or reviews take place within a day of submission (a figure that positively surprised this reviewer, through a current AfC status report suggests a situation has worsened since: "Severe backlog: 2599 pending submissions"). In either case, the authors find that about a third of so of newcomers using AfC system fail to understand the fact that they need to finalize the process by submitting their drafts to the review at all - a likely indication that the AfC instructions need revising, and that the AfC regulars may want to implement a system of identifying stalled drafts, which in some cases may be ready for mainspace despite having never been officially "submitted" (due to their newbie creator not knowing about this step or carrying it properly). The authors do however stand by their second hypothesis, i.e. they conclude that the AfC articles suffer from not receiving collaborative help they would if they were mainspaced. They discuss the a specific case of an article (Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Dwight_K._Shellman,_Jr/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Dwight_Shellman). This article has been tagged potentially rescuable (WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/G13_rescue) and has been languishing in that state for years, hidden in the AfC namespace, together with many other similarly backlogged articles (Category:AfC pending submissions by age/Very old), all stuck in a low visibility limbo, prevented from receiving proper Wikipedia-style collaboration-driven improvements (or deletion discussions) as an article in the mainspace would receive.

The authors also identify a number of other reasons that reduce the functionality of the AfC process. As in many other aspects of Wikipedia, negative feedback dominates. Reviewers are rarely thanked for anything, but are more likely to be criticized for passing an article deemed problematic by another editor; thus leading to the mentality that "rejecting articles is safest" (as newbies are less likely to complain about their article's rejection than experienced editors about passing one). AfC also suffers from the same "one reviewer" problem as GA - the reviewer may not always be qualified to carry the review, yet the newbies have little knowledge how to ask for a second opinion. The authors specifically discuss a case of reviewers not familiar with the specific notability criteria: "[despite being notable] an article about an Emmy-award winning TV show from the 1980's was twice declined at AfC, before finally being published 15 months after the draft was started". Presumably if this article was not submitted to a review it would never be deleted from the mainspace. The authors are also critical of the interface of the AfC process, concluding that it is too unfriendly to newbies, instruction wise: "Newcomers do not understand the review process, including how to submit articles for review and the expected timeframe for reviews" and "Newcomers cannot always find the articles they created. They may recreate drafts, so that the same con-tent is created and reviewed multiple times. This is worsened by having multiple article creation spaces(Main, userspace, Wikipediatalk, and the recently-created Draft namespace".

The authors conclude that the AfC works well as a filtering process for the encyclopedia, however "for helping and training newcomers [it] seems inadequate". The AfC succeeds in protecting content under (recently established) G13, in theory allowing newbies to keep fixing it - but many do not take this opportunity. Neither is the community able to deal with this, and thus the authors call for a creation of "a mechanism for editors to find interesting drafts". That said, this reviewers wants to point out that the G13 backlog, while quite interesting (thousands of articles almost ready for main space...), is not the only backlog Wikipedia has to deal with - something that the authors overlook. The G13 backlog is likely partially a result of imperfect AfC design that could be improved, but all such backlogs are also an artifact of the lack of active editors affecting Wikipedia projects on many levels. In either case, AfC regulars should carefully examine the authors suggestions. This reviewer in particular finds the following ideas worth pursuing. 1) Determine which drafts need collaboration and make them more visible to potential editors. Here the authors suggest use of a recent academic model that should help automatically identify valuable articles, and then feeding those articles to SuggestBot. 2)  Support newcomers’ first contributions - almost a dead horse at this point, but we know we are not doing enough to be friendly to newcomers. In particular, the authors note that we need to create better mechanisms for newcomers to get help on their draft, and to improve the article creation advice, in particular - the Article Wizard. (As a teacher who introduced hundreds of newcomers to Wikipedia, I can attest myself that the current outreach to newbies on those levels is grossly inadequate).

A final comment, to the community in general: was AfC intended to help newcomers, or was it intended from the start to reduce the strain on new page patrollers by sandboxing the drafts in the first place? One of the roles of AfC is to prevent problematic articles from appearing in the mainspace, and it does seem that in this role it is succeeding quite well. English Wikipedia community has rejected the Flagged revisions-like tool, but allowed implementation of it on a voluntary basis for newcomers, who in turn may not often realize that by choosing the AfC process, friendly on a surface, they are in fact slow-tracking themselves, and inviting extra-ordinary scrutiny. This leads to a larger question that is worth considering: we, the Wikipedia community of active editors, have declined to have our edits classified as second tier and hidden from public until reviewed, but we are fine pushing this on to the newbies. To what degree this is contributing to the general trend of Wikipedia being less and less friendly to newcomers? Is the resulting quality control worth turning away potential newbies? Would we be here if years ago our first experience with Wikipedia was through AfC?
 * AFC was originally created by Jimbo-edict (not community consensus) as a consequence of the Siegenthaler incident as a mechanism to prevent the creation of blatantly libelous articles by unregistered editors. It's secondary "newbie teaching" role developed later. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:37, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * That's a very interesting factoid; Roger - can you provide a cite for it? Wikipedia internal one will be fine, listerv or such. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:09, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * See Wikipedia Signpost/2005-12-05/Page creation restrictions. The "experimental" restriction is still in place - unregistered editors cannot create new pages, except Talk pages. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:23, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * That's about the implementation of the restriction, not about the creation of the AFC process that is the subject of the paper. (Requested articles, mentioned in this Signpost article, is not the same as Articles for creation.) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Oooookay... If we're splitting hairs to that extent I need to rephrase: AFC was created as a mechanism to allow anons to create articles in response to the restriction imposed by the WMF in the wake of the Siegenthaler incident. But come on dude, you're the one here with the "(WMF)" suffix appended to your signature - do your own homework - the early page history is available to you. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:55, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Roger (Dodger67), I disagree that this is "splitting hairs". There were surely numerous alternative processes that could have been implemented for article creation by anons after Jimmy decided to make user accounts mandatory for starting articles directly. In fact, the Foundation already implemented one such alternative, the Drafts: namespace that you probably already know. So it's unclear why you insist that the implementation of the anon article creation restriction and the creation of the AfC process must be treated as one and the same event - "AFC was originally created by Jimbo-edict (not community consensus)". It's tempting to interpret "do your own homework" as "I can't be bothered to provide evidence for my claims".
 * What's more, the AfC process as analyzed and criticized in this paper dates from more than half a decade later (see the caption of Figure 1 in the paper: "AfC’s era began in February 2011").
 * Anyway, thanks for your interest in the topic (I hope you also saw the talk page for Piotrus' review), and if you are interested in reviewing research papers such as this, you are cordially invited to contribute to future issues of the research report.
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 19 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks again, Piotrus! The todo list for next week's issue is coming together here. Re your preference for inline bylines, adding these is a responsibility that others intended to take on (and I usually won't have time for), see here. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk)

I was sollicited to provide some feedback on this thread. : I observe that your chronology of events (Siegenthaler, Jimbo's Fiat, the evolution of AFC, the request by members of enWP (including AFC) to have the Draft namespace) is so far out of sync with reality that I can only assume you are fabricating a desired timeline to support your viewpoint. Early on in the "research" that this was based on false premises... The consideration of how many submissions come in daily versus the amount of pages that are promoted is drastically imballanced. The consideration of pages that start out as a ward of AFC that survive 30 days is not a accurate judgement either as some pages may lie unviewed for months only to be deleted. Furthermore your argument with about who came up with the idea for the draft namespace (and demands to disprove his view) shows either your willful ignorance or deliberate incompetence as it took only 2 pages to get to the original RFC where the idea was proposed and accepted including the WikiMedia Bugzilla ticket ID (WP:DRAFTS which describes the namespace which links to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 107 which is the RFC on Village pump proposals and also includes the Bugzilla ticket ID). In the spirit of open and even handedness that the foundation (and it's employees) are supposed to be espousing, I strongly suggest you apologize to Rodger. CCing as the community advocate to take this suboptimal interaction back to her supervisors for further action. Hasteur (talk) 15:26, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Hasteur, your comment appears to be based on several major misunderstandings:
 * There was no "argument with about who came up with the idea for the draft namespace" as you claim. Instead, we had been talking about the original AfC process. (And in case it was lost on you, the paper studied AfC submissions up to 2013 only, whereas the Draft: namespace was activated at the end of 2013, first only as a less-used alternative.)
 * I am familiar with how the Draft: namespace came into being, thank you (e.g. in June I commented here on the fact that it was first suggested by community members, as you point out correctly). You appear to object to the statement that "the Foundation already implemented one such alternative, the Drafts: namespace" referring to the technical work of implementing this in software. However, that wasn't meant to assign the Foundation credit for the original Draft: proposal, but to indicate that it supported alternatives to what Dodger67 appears to have seen as Jimmy's (or WMF's) baby, and has put considerable technical resources into implementing one.
 * "Early on in the 'research' that this was based on false premises" - I'm not entirely sure if it's clear to you that I had nothing to do with the writing of this paper. (This thread is about Piotrus and myself organizing a review of the paper as part of the monthly research overview in the Signpost that I have been co-editing for over three years now.) I suggest you address these comments to the paper's authors or leave them on the talk page of Piotrus' review.
 * And BTW, the man's surname is spelled "Seigenthaler".
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 19 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello, Tbayer (WMF). I hope that I am not disrupting your review, but I would like to respond to the sentence "Would we be here if years ago our first experience with Wikipedia was through AfC?" I am not sure if it was you who wrote this, since there is no signature after that section, but in any case, I am a person whose first experience with Wikipedia editing was through AfC.  My article was declined by Bonkers the Clown.  However, I also received an invitation to the Teahouse, a welcome message with links to various help and policy pages, I read the links in the decline templates, made suggested improvements and was soon up and running.  I agree that AfC has problems, but I believe that it should be improved rather than discarded or replaced.  My suggested improvements: (1) Wikiprojects should implement the "draft" parameter in the talk page banners so that pages in draft would be brought to the attention of WikiProjects automatically (2) The search engine process which comes into play when a non-existent page title is typed should include an option to check for a draft-in-process before creating a new page (3) as was said above, AfC reviewers are criticized if they pass out articles which are then taken to AfD, so the community at large needs to agree that this is expected and it needs to be written clearly so that pages will be accepted sooner (4) The community of editors at large needs to be more clearly invited to help improve these drafts even if they don't want to be reviewers.  (When I first started participating in AfC I was told that if I edited other people's drafts they might blame me if the page was declined.)   One more comment I would like to make is this:  Any process that requires willing participation of volunteers can be deep-sixed by consistently and publicly criticizing it until no one wants to be part of it, and then criticizing it again because of the resulting backlog.  If each time an editor made a complaint or disparaging remark about AfC they were sentenced to spend an equal amount of time helping one of the new editors in the queue, there would be no backlog. (Okay, I have no diffs, this is my general impression.) &mdash;Anne Delong (talk) 21:07, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

RR—next scheduled date for the SP?
Hi, it was delayed by a week this time: no matter, but should we presume the next RR will be on 24 September or 1 October? Tony  (talk)  01:19, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Tony, it's 24 September, per the usual schedule (last issue of the month). I've now added the newsroom notice too. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 02:48, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for September 2014 edition

 * reviewing
 * This paper contributes to the debata around editor retention. The authors use techniques such as the topic modeling and non-negative matrix factorization. to categorize Wikipedians into several different profiles. Those profiles, or user roles, are based on namespaces that editors are most active in. The authors analyzed the behavior of about half a million of Wikipedia editors. The authors find that short-term editors seem to lack interest in one aspect of Wikipedia, editing various namespaces briefly before leaving the project. Long term editors are more likely to focus on one or two namespaces (usually, main, plus article or user talk), and only after some time diversify to different namespaces. The authors note that "e show that understanding patterns of change in user behavior can be of practical importance for community management and maintenance". Unfortunately, the paper is heavy in jargon and statistical models, and provides little practical data (or at least, that data is not presented well). For example, the categorization of editors into seven group is very interesting, but no descriptive data is presented that would allow us to compare the number of editors in each group. Further, the paper promises to use those profiles to predict editor lifecycles, but such models don't seem to be present in the paper. In the end, this reviewer finds this paper to be an interesting idea that hopefully will develop into some research with meaningful findings - for now, however, it seems more of a theoretical analysis with no practical applications.

--<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:31, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Update: either etherpad is down or my 'net is borked and I cannot access it anymore. Will try again tomorrow :(

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for October 2014 edition

 * looks at use and abuse of cleanup tags and infobox elements as conceptual and symbolic tools. Based on ethnographic observations and several interviews, the author provides a lengthy description of the formative first three or so weeks in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article. It is a valuable study of how articles are developed, and the collaboration and conflicts that is common in high-activity articles. The author provides a valuable observation that "Classification work... is intensely political" and "the editing of Wikipedia articles involves continuous linking and classifying." The choice of words, categories, article titles, but also specific tags or infoboxes (through a particular example discussed - whether to use Template:Infobox uprising or not - seems to concern a template that does not, in fact, exist) can be quite controversial. The author also an interesting argument that removal of cleanup tags may give false impressions of stability in articles that are not yet stable; and that infoboxes carry significant, perhaps undue weight, compared to other elements of the article. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 09:50, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 * This paper looks at Wikipedia through a number of organizational theory lenses, in particular theories of organizational identity. Of particular interest to Wikipedians is one of the aspects analyzed by the editors - identify of the project. The authors state that "the organizational identify at Wikipedia is based on freedom". Next, they discuss how the utopian ideals of freedom (such as "anyone can edit"), when contrasted with the freedom-reducing tendencies of censorship, administrative control, and bureaucratization. The authors argue that the common solution to criticism of Wikipedia, within community, is concealment and marginalization of said criticism. The authors point to the practical defanging of the Ignore all rules policy, which has went through a numberof meaning shifts, in which it was redefined to be virtually toothless, even through the name remained the same. Another way that freedom is limited is through end-justifies-the-mean utopian vision of "free access [to Wikipedia] for everyone", replacing the older "anyone can edit" "freedom of editing meaning. Unfortunately, the author's discussion of "the subjugation of contesting voices" is very short on details and specifics; the authors allude to administrator power abuse, but fail to provide any specific discussion of how it occurs; an example they used of "deleted content" can be interpreted as nothing more sinister then admin ability to delete content that does not meet Wikipedia's site policies, including uncontroversial content such as spam. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:20, 27 October 2014 (UTC) PS. Reviewed, but the beginning and the end are terrible jargon/buzzword/sleepiness inducing stuff I cannot extract anything out of value other than "Wikipedia is an organization that is constantly changing" -- Piotr
 * This paper touch upon a very interesting yet understudied area: what Wikipedia's existence means for copyright law. As the authors note, Wikipedia "appears to challenge some of the notions at the heart of copyright law." --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:44, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 * This paper claims to presents an ethnographically analysis of and a strong critique of Wikipedia's dispute resolution procedures, and states upfront its goal as "to tease out systemic discrimination or injustice". The strongly-worded abstract is attention-drawing, promising that "A number of flaws will be identified including the ability for vocal minorities to dominate the Wikipedia community consensus". Unfortunately, while the paper provides a very detailed description of Wikipedia's dispute resolution scene, it doesn't seem to present any new data; it's critique of "vocal minorities", for example, is composed of few sentences, and the entire argument is based on, and essentially a repetition of a similar passage in Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration book. While the paper is well written and presents a number of valid arguments, it does not seem to contribute anything new to our understanding of Wikipedia, being in essence a literature review focused on the topic of dispute resolution on Wikipedia. Which this reviewer finds disappointing, considering the almost tabloid-style abstract, and the introductory section promise of ethnographic research, which - like anything else going beyond synthesis of existing, published research - is sadly very much absent from the paper. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:44, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for November 2014 edition

 * reviewing

This study analyzed the development of the referencing of 45 articles over nine topic groups related to health and nutrition over a period of five years (2007-2011) (unfortunately, the authors are not very clear on which particular articles were analyzed, and tend to use the concepts of an article and topic group in a rather confusing manner). Authors coded for references (3,029 total), information on editing history, and search ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines. The study confirmed that Wikipedia articles are highly ranked by all search engines, with Yahoo! actually being even more "Wikipedia-friendly" than Google. The author shows that (as expected) the articles improve in quality (or at least, number and density of references) over time. Crucially, the authors show that the overall percentage of mainstream news media references has decreased, while references to academic publications increased over that time. By the end of the study period, only article on (or topic group of?) trans fat contained more references to news sources than to academic publications. The authors overall support the description of Wikipedia as a source aiming for reliablity, through are hesitant to call it reliable, pointing out that for example 15% of analyzed references were coded as "outside the main reference type categories or... not be clearly determined". The authors conclude, commendably, that "Wikipedia needs to be high on the agenda for health communication researchers and practitioners." and that "communications professionals in the health field need to be much more actively involved in ensuring that the content on Wikipedia is reliable and well sourced with reliable references". --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 07:08, 25 November 2014 (UTC)


 * reviewing

This article contributes to the discussion on gender inequalities on Wikipedia. The authors take a novel approach of looking for answers outside the Wikipedia community, thus also tying their reseearch into the analysis of new editors recruitment, motivations, and barriers to contribute. The authors focus their analysis on the role of Internet experiences and skills, and their lack among certain groups. The authors study whether the level of one's skills in digital literacy is related to their chance of becoming a Wikipedia editor, by surveying 547 young adults (aged 21-22) - students at a (presumably American) university, the most convenience sample in academia. The survey was carried in 2009, with a follow-up wave in 2012. The students were asked about their socioeconomic and demographic background, as well as about their level of digital literacy skills. The authors report that "the average respondent's confidence in editing Wikipedia is relatively low" but that "about one in eight students had been given an assignment in class at some point either to edit or create a new entry on Wikipedia" - which likely suggests that the (undisclosed by authors) university was one where at least one member of the faculty participated in the Education Program. The vast majority (99%) of respondents reported having read an entry on Wikipedia, and over a quarter (28%) have had some experience editing it (interestingly, even when controlling for students who were assigned to edit Wikipedia, the former number still is as high as 20%).

With regards to the gender gap issues, women are much less likely to have contributed to Wikipedia than men (21% to 38%), and that becomes even more divergent when controlling for student assignments (13% to 32%). The authors find indication of gender gap affecting the likelyhood of Wikipedia's contributions: students who are white, economically affluent, male and Internet-experienced are more likely to edit than others. The strongest and statistically significant predictor variables, however, are Internet skills and gender, and regression models show that variables such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, availability, Internet experience, and confidence in editing Wikipedia are not significant. The authors find that the gender becomes more significant as one's digital literacy increases. At low level of Internet skills, the likelyhood of one's contribution to Wikipedia is low, regardless of gender. As one's skills increase, males became much more likely to contribute, but women fall behind. The authors find that women tend to have lower Internet skills than men, which helps explain a part of the Wikipedia gender gap: to contribute to Wikipedia, one needs to have a certain level of digital literacy, and the digital gap is reducing the number of women who have required level of skills. The authors crucially admit that "why women, on average, report lower level understanding of Internet-related terms remains a puzzle. Studies with detailed data about actual skills based on performance tests suggest no gender differences in the observed skills research that looks at self-rated know-how consistently finds gender variation with real consequences for online behavior". This suggests that while men and women have, in reality, similar skills, women are much less confident about them, which in turns makes them much less confident about contributing to (or trying to conribute to) Wikipedia. This, however, is a hypothesis to be confirmed by future research. In the end, the authors do feel confident enough to conclude that "gender and Internet skills likely have a relatively mild interaction with each other, reinforcing the gender gap at the high end of the Internet skills spectrum." In the end, this reviwer finds this study to be a highly valuable one, both for the literature on gender gap and online communities, and for the Wikipedia community and WMF efforts to reduce this gap in our environment.


 * 

This book chapter looks at the Wikimedia community as a social movement. The book chapter is interesting as in clearly placing itself in the relatively small body of literature that describe Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a social movement, unfortunately it is primarily a descriptive, rather than an analytical piece, and does not provide any significant theoretical justification for calling the Wikimedia movement a social movement, a weakness amplified by the fact that this work fails to engage with prior relevant body of Wikipedia research, and is only very loosely connected to the literature on social movements.

I think that's all I have time for today, --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 08:01, 25 November 2014 (UTC)


 * 

This article proposes a way for combining Wikipedia and Online Books Page data, for the purpose of identifying most notable (important, popular, read) authors whose work is about to enter the public domain, in order to facilitate and prioritize digitization of their works. The proposed algorithm may be of interest to members of WikiProject Books, WikiProject Libraries, WikiProject Open, and related ones, as a means generating a Assessment importance rating and selecting underdeveloped articles for development.

TB, I think we should have one of our librarians develop this further. Ping User:Phoebe? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:16, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The authors use Pierre Bourdieu's theories to analyze cultural similarities and differences between 31 European countries, by looking at the differences between articles on various national cuisines across 27 different European languages Wikipedias. The authors find that the existence, quality and links of studied Wikipedia articles can be correlated with data from the European Social Survey on cross-cultural ties between European countries. In addition to expected findings (all cultures are interested in their own cuisine first, then in famous ones such as French cuisine and in those of their neighbours), the article does present some interesting data, for example noting that the articles on Turkish cuisine are relatively well developed on numerous Wikipedia's, which could be explained by long-term and significant in size migration of Turkish people to various European countries, and the resulting interest in Turkish cuisine in those countries. The authors also find that significant differences do exist between different language Wikipedias, as different cuisines can be very differently described on different projects, thus reinforcing the theory that knowledge can be significantly influenced by one's culture. For Wikipedia editors, this is a reminder that all language editions suffer from significant biases, and that articles in different language editions can and usually are significantly different. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:42, 26 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Piotr! Copied to Wikipedia Signpost/2014-11-26/Recent research.
 * It would be great if, in addition to judging its merit, you could also provide a brief summary of the content of that Polish-language book chapter, in particular to make it more accessible to English readers.
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:14, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Done (on the Signpost page). --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:13, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus contributions on Wikipedia's research for December 2014 edition

 * 
 * This paper discusses an educational project that used Wikinews in an undergraduate journalism course at the Australian University of Wollongong. While the use of Wikipedia in education has dominated the relevant discussions, Wikinews seems like a valuable, yet underused tool for journalists-in-training. Through this essay-like paper seems to describe the experience in a positive fashion, it does not contain any specific conclusions, nor a list of articles edited by the students that would allow for a more-in depth commentary in the context of the Wikimedia learning experience. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  11:04, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
 * 
 * This paper uses the technology acceptance model to shed light on faculty's (of Universitat Oberta de Cataluny) views of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. The main factors are shown to be e perception of colleagues’ opinion about Wikipedia and the perceived quality of the information on Wikipedia. As the authors note, while prior studies also pointed to the quality concerns, this study suggest a causal link between colleagues' views and one's perception of Wikipedia quality. The authors conclude that the strong peer culture within academia makes the importance of role models very significant, which in turns has implications for that part of the Wikimedia movement which desires greater ties with the academic world. The authors also note that " despite the lack of institutional support and acknowledgement, a growing number of academics think it is very useful and desirable to publish research results or even intermediate data in open repositories.", an attitude which also correlates positively with positive views of Wikipedia. To quote the authors very valid recommendation: "For those faculty members already using Wikipedia as a learning tool,we think it would have greater impact if they publically acknowledged their practices more, especially to their close colleagues,and explain their own teaching experiences as well as the effects it has had on the students’ academic performance." --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 13:46, 30 December 2014 (UTC)