After a break in September, we’re resuming our monthly Research and Data showcase. The
next showcase will be live-streamed tomorrow Wednesday October 15 at 11.30 PT. As usual
you can join the conversation via IRC on
freenode.net by joining the #wikimedia-research
channel.
We look forward to seeing you there,
Dario
This month:
Emotions under Discussion: Gender, Status and Communication in Wikipedia
By David Laniado: I will present a large-scale analysis of emotional expression and
communication style of editors in Wikipedia discussions. The talk will focus especially on
how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication
network of the about 12000 editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English
Wikipedia's article talk pages. The analysis is based on three different predefined
lexicon-based methods for quantifying emotions: ANEW, LIWC and SentiStrength. The results
unveil significant differences in the emotional expression and communication style of
editors according to their status and gender, and can help to address issues such as
gender gap and editor stagnation.
Wikipedia as a socio-technical system
By Aaron Halfaker: Wikipedia is a socio-technical system. In this presentation, I'll
explain how the integration of human collective behavior ("social") and
information technology ("technical") has lead to a phenomena that, while being
massively productive, is poorly understood due to lack of precedence. Based on my work in
this area, I'll describe five critical functions that healthy, Wikipedia-like
socio-technical systems must serve in order to continue to function: allocation,
regulation, quality control, community management and reflection. Next I'll argue the
Wikimedia Foundation's analytics strategy currently focuses on outcomes related to a
relatively narrow aspect of system health and all but completely ignores productivity.
Finally, I'll conclude with an overview of three classes of new projects that should
provide critical opportunities to both practically and academically understand the
maintenance of Wikipedia's socio-technical fitness.