Pursuant to prior discussions about the need for a research
policy on Wikipedia, WikiProject Research is drafting a
policy regarding the recruitment of Wikipedia users to
participate in studies.
At this time, we have a proposed policy, and an accompanying
group that would facilitate recruitment of subjects in much
the same way that the Bot Approvals Group approves bots.
The policy proposal can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research
The Subject Recruitment Approvals Group mentioned in the proposal
is being described at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group
Before we move forward with seeking approval from the Wikipedia
community, we would like additional input about the proposal,
and would welcome additional help improving it.
Also, please consider participating in WikiProject Research at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Research
--
Bryan Song
GroupLens Research
University of Minnesota
Hi!
I am doing a PhD on online civic participation project
(e-participation). Within my research, I have carried out a user
survey, where I asked how many people ever edited/created a page on a
Wiki. Now I would like to compare the results with the overall rate of
wiki editing/creation on country level.
I've found some country-level statistics on Wikipedia Statistics (e.g.
3,000 editors of Wikipedia articles in Italy) but data for UK and
France are not available since Wikipedia provides statistics by
languages, not by countries. I'm thus looking for statistics on UK and
France (but am also interested in alternative ways of measuring wiki
editing/creation in Sweden and Italy).
I would be grateful for any tips!
Sunny regards, Alina
--
Alina ÖSTLING
PhD Candidate
European University Institute
www.eui.eu
Hi everyone,
WMF researchers have agreed to participate in an office hour about WMF research projects and methodologies.
The currently scheduled participants are:
* Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor)
* Jonathan Morgan, Research Strategist (contractor)
* Evan Rosen, Data Analytics Manager, Global Development
* Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager
* Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
We'll meet on IRC in #wikimedia-office on April 22 at 1800 UTC. Please join us.
Pine
Hi all;
I'm starting a new project, a wiki search engine. It uses MediaWiki,
Semantic MediaWiki and other minor extensions, and some tricky templates
and bots.
I remember Wikia Search and how it failed. It had the mini-article thingy
for the introduction, and then a lot of links compiled by a crawler. Also
something similar to a social network.
My project idea (which still needs a cool name) is different. Althought it
uses an introduction and images copied from Wikipedia, and some links from
the "External links" sections, it is only a start. The purpose is that
community adds, removes and orders the results for each term, and creates
redirects for similar terms to avoid duplicates.
Why this? I think that Google PageRank isn't enough. It is frequently
abused by farmlinks, SEOs and other people trying to put their websites
above.
Search "Shakira" in Google for example. You see 1) Official site, 2)
Wikipedia 3) Twitter 4) Facebook, then some videos, some news, some images,
Myspace. It wastes 3 or more results in obvious nice sites (WP, TW, FB).
The wiki search engine puts these sites in the top, and an introduction and
related terms, leaving all the space below to not so obvious but
interesting websites. Also, if you search for "semantic queries" like
"right-wing newspapers" in Google, you won't find real newspapers but
"people and sites discussing about ring-wing newspapers". Or latex and
LaTeX being shown in the same results pages. These issues can be resolved
with disambiguation result pages.
How we choose which results are above or below? The rules are not fully
designed yet, but we can put official sites in the first place, then .gov
or .edu domains which are important ones, and later unofficial websites,
blogs, giving priority to local language, etc. And reaching consensus.
We can control aggresive spam with spam blacklists, semi-protect or protect
highly visible pages, and use bots or tools to check changes.
It obviously has a CC BY-SA license and results can be exported. I think
that this approach is the opposite to Google today.
For weird queries like "Albert Einstein birthplace" we can redirect to the
most obvious results page (in this case Albert Einstein) using a hand-made
redirect or by software (some little change in MediaWiki).
You can check a pretty alpha version here http://www.todogratix.es (only
Spanish by now sorry) which I'm feeding with some bots.
I think that it is an interesting experiment. I'm open to your questions
and feedback.
Regards,
emijrp
--
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT <http://code.google.com/p/avbot/> |
StatMediaWiki<http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es>
| WikiEvidens <http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/> |
WikiPapers<http://wikipapers.referata.com>
| WikiTeam <http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/>
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
The May 2013 issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter is out:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/May
In this issue:
• 1 Motivations to contribute to the Persian Wikipedia
• 2 Science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than on the English Wikipedia?
• 3 In brief
• Winning and losing argument patterns in deletion debates
• Why English Wikinews rejects submissions
• Wikipedia as a discussion forum for Malaysian students
• Using Wikipedia to predict the stock market
• Main NPOV concerns in articles about corporations: Promotional language and inclusion of criticism
• "Gangnam Style" pageview trends
• 4 References
••• 9 publications were covered in this issue •••
Thanks to: Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Halfaker, Taha Yasseri, Daniel Mietchen for contributing
Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer
--
Wikimedia Research Newsletter
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/
* Follow us on Twitter/Identi.ca: @WikiResearch
* Receive this newsletter by mail: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/research-newsletter
* Subscribe to the RSS feed: http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/research-2/wikimedia-research-newsletter/feed/
As usual, apologies for cross-posting -- but do consider submitting an
abstract! Deadline: 30 June.
Taha
* * *
SECOND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
ECCS '13
Computational Social Science: From Social Contagion to Collective Behaviour
Barcelona, 19th September 2013
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/collectivecontagion/
IMPORTANT DATES
Abstract submission deadline: June, 30 2013
Workshop date: September, 19 2013
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Intense scientific debate is going around the definition of the
foundational concepts and appropriate methodological approaches to deal
with the understanding of social dynamics. These challenges are aiming to
understand human behavior in its complexity driven by intentional (and not
necessarily rational) decisions and influenced by a multitude of factors.
The functioning of communication-based mechanisms requires individuals to
interact in order to acquire information to cope with uncertainty and thus
deeply rely on the accuracy and on the completeness of information (if
any). In fact, people's perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and opinions about
the world and its evolution, get (in)formed and modulated through the
information they can access. Moreover their response is not linear as
individuals can react by accepting, refusing, or elaborating (and changing)
the received information.
Technology-mediated social collectives are taking an important role in the
design of social structures. Yet our understanding of the complex
mechanisms governing networks and collective behaviour is still quite
shallow. Fundamental concepts like authority, leader-follower dynamics,
conflict or collaboration in online networks are still not well defined and
investigated - but they are crucial to illuminate the advantages and
pitfalls of this form of collective decision-making (which can cancel out
individual mistakes, but also make them spiral out of control).
The aim of this satellite is to address the question of ICT mediated social
phenomena emerging in multiple scales ranging from the interactions of
individuals to the emergence of self-organized global movements. We would
like to gather researchers from different disciplines to form a forum to
discuss ideas, research questions, recent results, and future challenges in
this emerging area of research and public interest.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
. Interdependent social contagion process
. Peer production and mass collaboration
. Temporally evolving networks and stream analytics
. Cognitive aspects of belief formation and revision
. Online communication and information diffusion
. Viral propagation in online social network
. Crowd-sourcing: herding behaviour vs. wisdom of crowds
. E-democracy and online government-citizen interaction
. Online socio-political mobilizations
. Public attention and popularity
Questions about the conference scope should be directed to the program
co-chairs at eccs2013collectivecontagion(a)bifi.es
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
One page abstracts are to be submitted in pdf via EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=eccs2013collectiveco
The deadline for abstract submission is 30 June 2013.
The contributions to the event will be evaluated by the programme committee
through a peer review process that will account for the scientific quality
as well as for the relevance of the contribution to the aims of the
satellite.
The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified via e-mail by 15 July
2013.
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
. Javier Borge-Holthoefer (BIFI, University of Zaragoza, Spain)
. Guido Caldarelli (IMT Lucca, Italy)
. Rosaria Conte (ISTC CNR, Italy)
. Sandra González-Bailón (Oxford Internet Institute, University of
Oxford, UK)
. Márton Karsai (Northeastern University, USA; Aalto University,
Finland)
. Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK)
. Walter Quattrociocchi (Northeastern University, USA)
. Luca Rossi (Northeastern University, USA)
. Alessandro Vespignani (Northeastern University, USA; ISI
Foundation, Italy)
. Taha Yasseri (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK)
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
. Javier Borge-Holthoefer (BIFI, University of Zaragoza, Spain)
. Sara Brunetti (University of Siena, Italy)
. Guido Caldarelli (IMT Lucca, Italy)
. Rosaria Conte (ISTC, CNR, Italy)
. Gennaro Cordasco (University of Naples, Italy)
. Santo Fortunato (Aalto University, Finland)
. Bruno Gonçalves (Aix-Marseille Université, France)
. Sandra González-Bailón (Oxford Internet Institute, University of
Oxford, UK)
. Márton Karsai (Northeastern University, USA; Aalto University,
Finland)
. Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK)
. Mario Paolucci (ISTC CNR, Italy)
. Walter Quattrociocchi (Northeastern University, USA)
. Luca Rossi (Northeastern University, USA)
. Antonio Scala (ISC CNR, Italy)
. Flaminio Squazzoni (University of Brescia)
. Alessandro Vespignani (Northeastern University, USA)
. Taha Yasseri (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK)
--
Dr Taha Yasseri
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/yasseri/
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
1 St.Giles
Oxford OX1 3JS
Tel.01865-287229
-------------------------------------------
http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/21/call-for-participation-doctoral-worksho…
They're reviewing applications right now; applying earlier is better.
The application form is really short. Scholars who study Wikimedia
readers' and editors' behavior, and who want better tools to analyse the
datasets available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data ,
might benefit.
> We invite doctoral students who study human behavior in digital environments, and who are at the beginning stages of their dissertation work, to apply to a workshop focusing on methodological issues in this kind of research.
> The goal of the workshop is to bring together about a dozen junior and half-a-dozen senior scholars to discuss methodological best practices for the in-depth study of human behavior in digital environments. So-called “big data” offer lots of opportunities to study the social world, but may miss insights that methods such as in-person observations and interviews can discover. Bringing different types of data and methods together can help address challenges, such as biased data sets, and can help glean new insights. Workshop participants will discuss tools that exist and tools that need to be developed for sharable, sustainable, and scalable approaches to collecting, coding, and analyzing comparable data about human behavior in digital environments.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation