Wikipedia:Understanding the English Wikipedia Category System



Welcome! This is the project page for the research project Understanding the English Wikipedia Category System. This project seeks to explore and describe the category system in the English Wikipedia--a "natural history" of the category system, if you will. The project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and runs through December, 2014. This project is the first phase of a larger 5-phase research and development agenda, a primary goal of which is to improve the utility and use of category systems across WMF projects. For a fuller description of the project and the whole R&D agenda, see the grant page here.

The principal investigator for the project is Paul J. Weiss (Libcub on en:WP, etc.). I have been a Wikimedian for over 6 years, with over 3200 edits in the English Wikipedia, and a few contributions to other projects. My bachelor's is in linguistics, my master's is in library & information studies, and I am now in the PhD program in information science at the University of Washington's Information School. I have spent 28 years as a librarian in the field, working primarily in the cataloging and metadata spheres.

Get involved
Although I am the official grantee, and remain responsible for the success of the project, I want this project to be a collaboration between me and those of you who are interested in getting involved. Being a preeminent open content and open collaboration project, Wikipedia is in a unique position to lead in the area of open research and public scholarship. So let's lead, together!

Ways to participate
I will add more as the project progresses.

Help shape the direction of the project: Share your thoughts with the rest of us on priority setting, making tasks as efficient as possible, interpretation of results, use and implications of results, and where to disseminate findings. I plan to post specific questions for the community for focused discussion on the talk page from time to time. And feel free to post your other thoughts anytime.

Take on specific tasks: As the project moves forward, I will post specific tasks that I can think of that folks might be interested in performing. If you have other ideas of ways you or others can contribute, let me know!

Serve as a MediaWiki API and Python resource: I am new to both, and I am sure I will have questions as I go. It would be great to have a person or two to go to with those.

Who we are


Interested in participating? Just want to show your support? Add your name here, and optionally let us know what your specific interests are and/or ways you want to participate.


 * Libcub (talk) 02:47, 23 July 2014 (UTC), grantee. I have been interested in knowledge organization since I was a kid. I am very excited to be able to do research in an area I find fascinating, while at the same time contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
 * Francis Schonken (talk) (disclosure:) some ten years ago I initiated a few guidelines (and contributed to many more), in the field of categorization most notably WP:COP. When I became more active as an editor again a few months ago I was somewhat disconcerted how categorization matters had evolved in the mean time at en.wikipedia. Probably I'm not uninvolved enough to participate actively in this research project. That being said, (a) I support the project wholeheartedly; (b) I hope it brings some clarity on categorization issues; (c) any categorization related questions are welcome, I'll try to answer; (d) I'll follow this of course! --12:53, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Project status and outcomes
[To be added as we go]

Challenges
Summer internship: My summer internship was supposed to be for roughly 90 hours total, but has ended up taking far more hours that that. The workload there is reducing now. It will be completely done by the end of September.

Health issues: I have been dealing with some health issues that have affected my energy and productivity levels for the last 6 weeks. That stuff is finally improving.

Availability of data: WMF may actually not have the data I would need to answer some of my questions related to usage of category links. And some data they probably have, but are not able to share it due to confidentiality reasons. As a strong proponent of privacy rights, I fully support the Foundation in taking care in the development of data sharing policies, non-disclosure agreements, methods for anonymizing data, etc. I am engaged in conversations with WMF staff about these issues.