A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
The 2011 study Content Disputes in Wikipedia Reflect Geopolitical Instability [1] was referenced in a recent article on Ozy. The study (not previously covered in the Signpost) considers whether Wikipedia's metadata may be used to glean insights into global phenomena. (Various online predictors have been associated with events. For instance, Google searches can be used to monitor the spread of infectious diseases.) The authors attempted to test whether Wikipedia content disputes can be used to understand real-life conflicts. They analyzed all pages linking to articles about a given country that had the "NPOV dispute" tag, though they note that only about a quarter (138 of 497) countries had a sufficient number of conflicts to allow further analysis. ( This reviewer wonders why the authors chose the "what links here" tool rather than the more precise category of WikiProject template groups of articles; a cursory look at the 100+ articles linked to Poland, for example, suggests that only ~20% are clearly related to that country.)
They then created a "Wikipedia Dispute Index" ( downloadable image of the index heat map), which measures whether a country has more or fewer than average disputes linking to it. The authors note that their index roughly matches the "1996–2008 World Bank Policy Research Aggregate Governance Indicators" and the "Economist Intelligence Unit 2009 Political Instability Index" ( downloadable image of the correlation plots between those indexes – not bad, given the underlying problem of using "what links here" as a dataset). The results indicate that "the most disputed are parts of the middle east followed by other regions such as Kosovo, Bosnia & Herzegovina and North Korea ..., countries in North America and Western Europe are the least disputed, with most other countries occupying a middle range." With regards to the type of conflicts, they observe that "the biggest contributors to the indicator tend to be disputes over current or historical events or individuals that vary according to different political views."
Though the authors present no convincing arguments about why exactly their index would be more or less useful then the existing ones, they write that it can be seen as a supplementary tool validating other indexes, and conclude that Wikipedia's data and metadata can be used to generate other useful indexes and metrics – something that this reviewer certainly agrees with.
Wikipedians may find the following page created for this project useful (for the next few years until it inevitably goes down as it stops being maintained – perhaps someone could contact the authors about moving it to the Toolserver/Labs?: http://www.disputeindex.org/ which displays the (gray and white) heatmap and lists Wikipedia articles that are being analyzed – a nice visual gadget for our internal cleanup purposes) PK
The roles that contributors play in Wikipedia (e.g. "copyeditor" or "vandal fighter") are informal and fluent, in contrast to other areas where roles are assigned and static. These types of roles are referred to as “emergent roles” in the literature, and a paper titled "On the "How" and "Why" of Emergent Role Behaviors in Wikipedia" [2] at the 2017 CSCW conference looks at the extent to which contributors move between roles, and if so, why they do it.
This paper builds upon work by some of the same authors at the 2015 CSCW conference, [supp 1] in which they studied functional roles, which are defined by access levels in the system. In the upcoming paper, they use a similar approach and dataset in order to quantify roles and whether contributors take on multiple roles. Using a perspective of roles and articles, the authors identify four classes of contributors:
When it comes to longevity, the Role-Article polymaths (7.4% of the contributor pool) are those who continue to stay active in the system for the longest time, with 4% of them being active for at least seven years. Role embracers also sustain participation over multiple years, and will often be focused on the second article they encounter.
To learn more about how contributor motivation affects role behaviour, a survey of a stratified sample of contributors was performed, with 175 valid responses. These surveys aimed at understanding contributor motivations across four dimensions: fun, forming friendships, gaining reputation, and peer approval. The results reveal striking differences in motivation between the classes, for instance Role-Article samplers are low across all four dimensions, while Article Embracers are the opposite, high across all four dimensions. Using Role-Article samplers as a baseline, transitioning to other classes are motivated as follows:
The paper then discusses these findings, proposing that each of the four behaviours plays a distinct role in how content is created in Wikipedia. For instance, the fact that some motivations are associated with role-transitioning behaviour while other motivations lead to transitioning between articles, means the other contributors can respond differently to those who display this type of behaviour in order to foster continued participation. MWW
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue— contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help) (dissertation at the University of Tübingen)
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help) (dissertation)
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
The 2011 study Content Disputes in Wikipedia Reflect Geopolitical Instability [1] was referenced in a recent article on Ozy. The study (not previously covered in the Signpost) considers whether Wikipedia's metadata may be used to glean insights into global phenomena. (Various online predictors have been associated with events. For instance, Google searches can be used to monitor the spread of infectious diseases.) The authors attempted to test whether Wikipedia content disputes can be used to understand real-life conflicts. They analyzed all pages linking to articles about a given country that had the "NPOV dispute" tag, though they note that only about a quarter (138 of 497) countries had a sufficient number of conflicts to allow further analysis. ( This reviewer wonders why the authors chose the "what links here" tool rather than the more precise category of WikiProject template groups of articles; a cursory look at the 100+ articles linked to Poland, for example, suggests that only ~20% are clearly related to that country.)
They then created a "Wikipedia Dispute Index" ( downloadable image of the index heat map), which measures whether a country has more or fewer than average disputes linking to it. The authors note that their index roughly matches the "1996–2008 World Bank Policy Research Aggregate Governance Indicators" and the "Economist Intelligence Unit 2009 Political Instability Index" ( downloadable image of the correlation plots between those indexes – not bad, given the underlying problem of using "what links here" as a dataset). The results indicate that "the most disputed are parts of the middle east followed by other regions such as Kosovo, Bosnia & Herzegovina and North Korea ..., countries in North America and Western Europe are the least disputed, with most other countries occupying a middle range." With regards to the type of conflicts, they observe that "the biggest contributors to the indicator tend to be disputes over current or historical events or individuals that vary according to different political views."
Though the authors present no convincing arguments about why exactly their index would be more or less useful then the existing ones, they write that it can be seen as a supplementary tool validating other indexes, and conclude that Wikipedia's data and metadata can be used to generate other useful indexes and metrics – something that this reviewer certainly agrees with.
Wikipedians may find the following page created for this project useful (for the next few years until it inevitably goes down as it stops being maintained – perhaps someone could contact the authors about moving it to the Toolserver/Labs?: http://www.disputeindex.org/ which displays the (gray and white) heatmap and lists Wikipedia articles that are being analyzed – a nice visual gadget for our internal cleanup purposes) PK
The roles that contributors play in Wikipedia (e.g. "copyeditor" or "vandal fighter") are informal and fluent, in contrast to other areas where roles are assigned and static. These types of roles are referred to as “emergent roles” in the literature, and a paper titled "On the "How" and "Why" of Emergent Role Behaviors in Wikipedia" [2] at the 2017 CSCW conference looks at the extent to which contributors move between roles, and if so, why they do it.
This paper builds upon work by some of the same authors at the 2015 CSCW conference, [supp 1] in which they studied functional roles, which are defined by access levels in the system. In the upcoming paper, they use a similar approach and dataset in order to quantify roles and whether contributors take on multiple roles. Using a perspective of roles and articles, the authors identify four classes of contributors:
When it comes to longevity, the Role-Article polymaths (7.4% of the contributor pool) are those who continue to stay active in the system for the longest time, with 4% of them being active for at least seven years. Role embracers also sustain participation over multiple years, and will often be focused on the second article they encounter.
To learn more about how contributor motivation affects role behaviour, a survey of a stratified sample of contributors was performed, with 175 valid responses. These surveys aimed at understanding contributor motivations across four dimensions: fun, forming friendships, gaining reputation, and peer approval. The results reveal striking differences in motivation between the classes, for instance Role-Article samplers are low across all four dimensions, while Article Embracers are the opposite, high across all four dimensions. Using Role-Article samplers as a baseline, transitioning to other classes are motivated as follows:
The paper then discusses these findings, proposing that each of the four behaviours plays a distinct role in how content is created in Wikipedia. For instance, the fact that some motivations are associated with role-transitioning behaviour while other motivations lead to transitioning between articles, means the other contributors can respond differently to those who display this type of behaviour in order to foster continued participation. MWW
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue— contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help) (dissertation at the University of Tübingen)
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help) (dissertation)
Discuss this story
See also the authors' comment on the "Emergent Role Behaviours ..." paper here. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) ( talk) 06:32, 30 October 2016 (UTC) reply