Wikipedia talk:List of academic studies about Wikipedia

Definition of academic studies
Well as this section is growing we have to define what academic studies is. I am trying to collect all articles that are listed by bibliographic databases because this is where scientists should search for literature. Keep in mind that scientific does not mean a higher quality but you should expect a specific level - scientifc communities have their own rules like our NPOV. -- Nichtich

IBM and Georgia Tech studies
Hi all. I wanted to bring it to your attention that you are missing some critical work done by Fernanda Viegas (IBM) and Forte and Bruckman (Georgia Tech). Here are the relevant citations. If anyone can put these in that would be great. Unfortunately I don't have time for it right now.

Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms. Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda B. Viégas, and Kate Hollenbach. Interact 2007.

The Hidden Order of Wikipedia. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Matthew M. McKeon. HCII, 2007.

Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss, Frank van Ham. HICSS-40, 2007.

The Visual Side of Wikipedia Fernanda B. Viégas. HICSS-40, 2007.

Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave. CHI 2004.

(the IBM papers, some of which I might be missing, are collected at: http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/publications.html )

Georgia Tech papers:

Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2008). Scaling consensus: increasing decentralization in Wikipedia governance. To appear in the Proceedings of Hawaiian International Conference of Systems Sciences (HICSS).

Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2007). Constructing text: wiki as a toolkit for (collaborative?) learning. To appear in the Proceedings of OOPSLA/ACM International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym).

Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2005). Why do people write for Wikipedia? Incentives to contribute to open-content publishing. GROUP 05 workshop: Sustaining community: The role and design of incentive mechanisms in online systems. Sanibel Island, FL.

(more papers by Andrea can be found on her homepage: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte/pubs.html )

Bestchai (talk) 23:02, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Spam abuse?
There seems to be some abuse being going on connected to the article by Cathy Ma. In fact, the web address of the paper returns an ad for holidays (a localized one, as it seems, for it is in German, my mother tongue). Has anybody had a similar experience? Or can anybody provide another link? - The paper is real and the link used to be correct, you can access it through the Google Archive... --129.194.8.73 11:07, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
 * You are right that the link is broken, my guess would be that the previous owner failed to renew the registration. If you can change the link for the working one from that archive, it would be great.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 17:25, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Info request
I don't know where I can add this article [http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42 Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past]. It is writed by ... for The Center for History and New Media etc... Can you put this article? Thanks --199.26.15.150 19:53, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Thx, I have added the info. I have been waiting for the article since I learned about it last year... nice :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 17:04, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia in amateur studies
I have compiled a list of studies published in Wikipedia space, as well as useful tools published here: see Researching Wikipedia.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:46, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible articles from Reagle
I don't want to add my own, but if people find them worthwhile published stuff is in: http://reagle.org/joseph/2003/cv.html Also, WP related blogging: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/ -Reagle 14:36, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

New studies

 * I study of mine, Scientific Citations in Wikipedia, has just been published in First Monday . I was hoping that someone might find the study worthwhile to add to the list? &mdash; fnielsen 10:41, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Congratulations and don't hesitate to add it yourself!--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 16:40, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Master thesis
Do we need a new section on thesis (masters, bachelors, phd...)? Here's a recent one: "Wikipedia as Collective Action". --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 16:40, 24 August 2007 (UTC)--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 16:40, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

University Business article
Not sure if this should go on this page, but it's kind of related. University Business Article on Web 2.0 GumbyProf: &quot;I&#39;m about ideas, but I&#39;m not always about good ideas.&quot; 00:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Article in Australian Quarterly
I have had an article published in Australian Quarterly that was derived from a conference paper I gave at the end of 2006. The article currently appears here but will only be available there until the next issue, as AQ is not an electronic journal. Perhaps someone could take a look at the article and see if it's worthwhile including? AQ is not peer-reviewed. It is more an intellectual journalistic/essay/opinion type of magazine. --Mat Hardy (Affentitten) (talk) 00:06, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Too late. The article is no longer available at that link because the next edition has replaced it. --Mat Hardy (Affentitten) (talk) 22:56, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
 * The link may be available in Internet Archive. Feel free to add it to the non-peer-reviewed section.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 22:21, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Keywords
I suppose that wikipedia is the default keyword for all articles listed here. --AKA MBG (talk) 18:04, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Good point, however when possible I try to use the original keywords as listed by the publisher, and they don't always use Wikipedia as a keyword. It may indicate if the article is centered on Wikipedia or not, perhaps, or the acceptance of Wikipedia as a keyword by an academic community.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 22:20, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Page and Table size
What do you think about splitting the first huge table into years (one table for one year)? Or may be even to create subpages for each year. --AKA MBG (talk) 11:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Splitting means the sort will be less useful, and I think the sortable tables are useful.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 07:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)


 * OK, I missed that the table columns could be sorted. All columns work (i.e. they really could be sorted), except the last column: keywords. Is it only my computer problem? --AKA MBG (talk) 14:56, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * They probably need to be standarized, also since articles often have many sources, the current 'sort by first alphabetical keyword' is not an optimal solution (but I am not sure how to improve it).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:59, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Article on wikis
Public Interest Research, Collaboration, and the Promise of Wikis Here is an article about wikis. I don't know if you have decided to list those. If not, could you point me to the right place to list it? Thanks! Awadewit (talk) 17:06, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Evaluating Wiki as a tool to promote quality academic writing skills
Evaluating Wiki as a tool to promote quality academic writing skills by Steve Wheeler, Dawn Wheeler, Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, UK. From the 10th International Conference on Interactive Computer aided Learning. May be of interest. DuncanHill (talk) 19:45, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Papers should be available online
I am not sure that it is good idea to put information to this page for articles that are not available online. I want delete references to papers of "Fogarolli Angela and Ronchetti Marco". What do you think? --AKA MBG (talk) 10:23, 20 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Absolutely not. Just because an article isn't available online doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate published article using Wikipedia, and it's good to try and keep a complete list of them in one place. Dcoetzee 03:08, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria
At the top of this page it says this list is for articles that "focus on Wikipedia as their subject." To me, this seems too strict; there are many papers that make more than a passing reference to Wikipedia, for example using it as a test corpus in information retrieval or compression, or adapting some mechanism of Wikipedia as inspiration. It seems clear that these works are worth noting here, although Wikipedia is not their subject per se, as long as it figures prominently. Dcoetzee 03:08, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

How much time is the average edit?
Does anyone know if any academic has calculated the average edit time for each edit? Inclusionist (talk) 06:15, 15 December 2008 (UTC)


 * It depends on what you mean for 'average edit time'. The average interval between edits is easy to get at &mdash; open the history of an article, take two dates from the history, and divide by the number of edits during that period.
 * I suspect, however, that you're actually looking for the average time that an editor works on each edit. That is much more difficult to get at, and as far as I know no one has that information.  You would need to have a way to record the time that the editor started editing; only the time that they finish and save their changes is recorded in the article histories.
 * One way might be to modify the Mediawiki software on the server to track when it served each edit screen (and then log the time until the article was next saved). This method is vulnerable to errors caused by editors who multitask.  (While I was composing this comment, I went out to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee.  I also often edit during commercial breaks on television, or between tasks at work.)  Another approach would be to find a number of volunteers who would install logging software on their computers; this approach would be costly and subject to a selection bias. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:50, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
 * thank you ten. I appreciate it. travb (talk) 21:54, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Philosophers analyze Wikipedia
Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-23/Philosophers analyze Wikipedia This is the first - as far as I know - issue of an academic journal dedicated to Wikipedia (correct me if I am wrong, but Wikimania has never released its proceedings in a peer-reviewed fashion, right?).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 22:56, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, yes. First Monday has had an issue or two with multiple Wikipedia papers, if I remember correctly, but not exclusive.--ragesoss (talk) 05:07, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Based on my analysis of studies up to May 2008, FM leads when it comes to Wikipedia-related publications (it had ~10, which is about twice as much as any other journal). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 19:48, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Reviewing books for the Wikipedia Signpost
The Signpost is seeking more reviewers for a range of upcoming and recent books related to Wikipedia. Sign up at the review desk.--ragesoss (talk) 05:07, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Completeness of table
I just stumbled across the Intelligence in Wikipedia Project, which has a whole bunch of papers which don't seem to be in the table. (I added one, but I'm slow with tables!) Does anyone know when a systematic effort to update the table was last made?Dsp13 (talk) 18:44, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. I did it in May, 2008 :) Since then we are back on sporradinc updates when people feel like it :( I thought about updating it recently, but I was dazzled by Google Scholar 18,000 hits for Wikipedia in 2008 - and I do have other things to do, both on and off Wikipedia. I'd guesstimate that the table is 90%+ complete for up to May 2008 and maybe 30-50% complete since then. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 19:47, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Carnegie-Mellon study
A new user, User:CMUResearcher, claims to be conducting a study for Carnegie-Mellon, but the study appears to be very unprofessional, and may be an attempt to fish for people's e-mail addresses. See User talk:CMUResearcher for details. &mdash; Sebastian 01:20, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * &diams; Unless User:CMUResearcher's stated affiliations are false, it's legit and is not fishing for e-mail addresses. I know personally the three people cited as team members (Kraut, Burke, Kittur), though not CMUResearcher himself, and they are world-class scientists in HCI. --R27182818 (talk) 14:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)


 * You are putting your belief before observation. Your belief that the person who posted this is the researcher you know may very well be true, but it does not logically follow from what we can observe. What we can observe is that someone claims to be a CMU researcher, and acts in a way that is decidedly not the way world class scientists do research. The scientists I have had the pleasure to work with may not be considered "world class" in your eyes, but I have never seen them do anything as amateurish as what I'm seeing here. (At least not publicly.) See User talk:CMUResearcher for a detailed discussion of this case. &mdash; Sebastian 18:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Suggested removal of non-English entries

 * Delete. I suggest that all non peer reviewed entries that refer to works that are not in English be removed. Additionally, I suggest that all non peer reviewed entries that do not study the En WP be removed. (It's okay if a work studies a combination of En WP as well as one or more non-En WPs.) This is the En WP after all, and I see no reason for the inclusion of non-En entries. These can very well be placed in the respective language WP instead. Accordingly, the article's criteria must be updated accordingly to allow only those works that are in En. Entries that are peer reviewed but non-En would eventually also need to be removed. If there are no reasoned objections by non-biased users, I'll update the criteria and begin the culling. --IO Device (talk) 14:12, 6 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete. I support removing the works that are not in English.
 * But I am not sure that articles about Wiktionary or Commons are not relevant to this page. -- Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 12:22, 7 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. I would rather leave publications in other languages, as well as publications which refer to non-EN wikipedia. As an English-language speaking researcher, I want references to all relevant publications, regardless of the language they're written in. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 19:16, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * If I may ask, how are the non-En publications useful, given that they can't be properly understood by someone not speaking the language? --IO Device (talk) 09:05, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * They're a pointer first off to people and research groups. Second, it's easy to get a rough translation of the title. If it's important enough, or closely related, a translation (machine or human) of the whole contents might be warranted. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 19:02, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Resize table?
The table is enormously wide. Would someone care to trim it down a bit?71.224.206.164 (talk) 19:10, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Question about how contributors "consistently and successfully violate policy without sanction"
See: Unequality shown in the enforcement of 3rr which discusses an academic study, which states some editors "consistently and successfully violate policy without sanction" and how this could be further proved or disproved.

Permalink:

Okip  12:57, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia and medicine
I have started a list of academic studies of Wikipedia's coverage of medicine / health care here Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 07:28, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

PhD and book to add from Reagle
Please add I don't want to risk messing up this page, but someone should add this book, based on this PhD. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:05, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Cleaning up the (supposedly) peer reviewed section
I looked through the entries in the peer review journals section, up to and including 2007. I removed a number of entries that were clearly not peer reviewed; in my latter edits I tried to clearly identify the reasons for the removal in edit summaries. I don't think I currently have the time and will to add them to the magazines (different format, sigh, so simple copy and paste won't work). And I think I missed a few, particularly from the early years, so I invite others to review those years again. Based on my reading, I estimate that the peer reviewed journal section is still inflated by about 10% due to some people either not realizing what is the difference between a peer reviewed paper and an editorial/magazine entry, or not caring to read the page instructions... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 18:26, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

A problem with File:Academic Wikipedia 05 2011.jpg
The leveling of conference papers suggest for me serious issues with the missing data on this graph. Also, conference papers should be more numerous than journals. As I noted above, the data might have been messed up by inclusion of conference papers in the journal section. Comparing this to File:Academic wikipedia 05-08.JPG is eyebrow raising, at the very least. I think the graph needs a revision, preferably after we clean up the primary list. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; talk to me 23:02, 8 November 2011 (UTC)


 * List of publications in WikiPapers contains a bars graph with _all_ the publications (conference papers + journals articles + others). I will try to generate one for conference papers alone. emijrp (talk) 14:29, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Literaturliste Wikipedistik
historian's bibliography, helpful? http://wiki.hist.net/Literaturliste_Wikipedistik -- Cherubino (talk) 21:48, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

A one meg wiki page? Are you people nuts?
Seriously, time to trim this. Josh Parris 11:59, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Heh, agreed. It's done now, it took some time for someone to pick it up because data migration is boring but today I copied all the data to wikipapers: http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/List_of_publications (it almost doubled in size).
 * All the data and information was preserved, it's not complete nor perfectly clean but it's the same we had here. As you notice, there's quite a gap with publications after 2011, because this page has mostly been abandoned after that. I'm currently working on importing the other major collections made by wikimedians, in particular m:Research:Newsletter and perhaps User:Moudy83/conference_papers, then we'll need to add what we lacked... --Nemo 22:36, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

book chapters here vs. WP:Wikipedia in books
This page links to WP:Wikipedia in books for academic "books and book chapters" on Wikipedia. That page in turn leads with "This page lists books which have discussed the Wikipedia concept," a ridiculously wide net that includes everything from books about WP (which is better covered at Bibliography of Wikipedia the curiously namespaced Bibliography of Wikipedia) to fiction that features WP and non-fiction with a paragraph or two on the subject.

In other words, it's pretty uneven. I mention that here not because I want to discuss that page here but because it seems there should be an exception to the policy of this page that chapters do not belong: edited collections. When the book chapters stand on their own, are peer-reviewed, and could just as easily be journal articles it seems a little silly to list them next to "Wikipedia is on page 456 of this scifi book." --Rhododendrites (talk) 18:19, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Found a new paper about Wikipedia
I have no idea what to do with this, but I believe it should be seen by Wikipedians:

Thanks Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:27, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Is nobody interested? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:31, 23 September 2017 (UTC)


 * If you want to help bring it to the attention of Wikipedians, you would be welcome to write a review or summary of the paper for the Signpost's "Recent research" section, which doubles as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter and reaches a large autidences of community members and academic researchers alike. Let me know in case you are interested! Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:19, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

There's this one, too:  It is in a peer reviewed journal, though not exactly neutral... EdChem (talk) 11:32, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

What source should I cite for the "wiki principle"?
Hi! I am currently writing an academic paper and the introduction includes a statement saying that Wikipedia is based on the "wiki principle" of "swarm intelligence and organic collaboration". What source should I cite for this statement? I imagine that there is a publication that is commonly cited here. Thanks, --Gnom (talk) 09:05, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

How to add a new publication to the table for 2018?
I came across this publication which I would like to add to the table for 2018 but don't know how to: Motivating Contributions to Public Information Goods: A Field Experiment on Wikipedia. I guess I would first have to create a WikiData entry for it? Could anyone help? Never used WikiData before and am hesitant to learn it. ;-) EMsmile (talk) 23:32, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
 * It could be possible to make a wikidata item for it if there are other bits of metadata that aren't included on the pdf. Could I confirm what it exactly is (e.g. /  / )? Publication date, publisher, part of a series, any identifiers (e.g. volume/issue/article numbers)? T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 01:17, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Good point. I think I have to e-mail the authors. It's annoying when the pdf file of a paper doesn't give sufficient detail. Would be better if it had a DOI for example. EMsmile (talk) 01:25, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I got in touch with the authors and they told me (in May) that it should be cited as follows: "Yan Chen, Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Iman YeckehZaare and Ark Fangzhou Zhang (2021). Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia. Under review at Management Science." I guess it's better to wait until the paper has been accepted at Management Science so I'll make a mental note to follow up on it later. It actually is a really interesting piece of research on how to motivate content experts to get involved with Wikipedia editing or article reviews. EMsmile (talk) 00:04, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Review article, count of studies?
I recall reading an article that counted more than 3000 papers on Wikipedia. I would like to find a source like that.

Can anyone recommend a review article which tried to be comprehensive in identifying all papers about Wikipedia, or which has a count? Thanks.  Bluerasberry  (talk)  00:09, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

List grouped by main subject
Could anyone familiar with the Listeria bot help me create a list grouped by main subject (which is already identified for each article), please. For example, I'd like to list all publications about "gender bias on Wikipedia". Thanks! fgnievinski (talk) 06:07, 25 March 2022 (UTC)


 * There is a property Q17002416: gender bias on Wikipedia you can use. Here's a sample query: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AVexations%2Flists%2FGender_bias_on_Wikipedia Vexations (talk) 12:11, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Article dump
1. Make sure everything from here gets added.

2. Here is a dump of other articles I found, not checked if they are on either of the existing lists already.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200508505H/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200606446G/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013PLoSO...865782H/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200608899K/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017PLoSO..1271774T/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012PLoSO...730091Y/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012PLoSO...738869Y/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021NatSR..1121505R/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014PLSCB..10E3892G/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015PLSCB..11E4239H/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200508505H/abstract

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017NRvHM..23...29L/abstract BhamBoi (talk) 04:23, 14 January 2023 (UTC)