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Thisproject,Wikidemia, provides a space for articles related to academic research about Wikipedia. Related pages include theStatistics Department,m:Research, andm:Statistics.This page and project are still very preliminary and will benefit from your contributions and insight. If you would like to help, please sign the Participants list below and introduce yourself on thetalk page. Theto-do list here is just a start...
ThisWikiProject aims primarily to design, implement, and discuss academic research about Wikipedia. We seek to better understand what promotes or circumscribes Wikipedia's success and why. We also seek to explore and rigorously evaluate new strategies for improving Wikipedia, and to archive research attempted by Wikipedians into related topics.
Pete (talk)04:29, 4 January 2008 (UTC) (Interested in presenting Wikipedia to the rest of the world, promoting wiki-based collaboration, etc., and seeking relevant data and stories.[reply]
Much data can be collected, and many metrics, to evaluate this question; to date no structured experiments or analyses have been done. See also thisanalysis of WMF fundraising drives, and theseproposals for ways to evaluate potential fundraising techniques.
Visualizations : History Flow (I and II), &c.
Wikipedia Quant Project: Quantitative and statistical analysis of Wikipedia content, community behavior, and policy change, to be performed on a new, multipurposestatistics server widely accessible to client researchers.
Use in primary education : how is Wikipedia used in primary schools, as source or knowledge, as introduction to collaboration, as space for contributing local knowledge? Ditto for Wikimedia Commons.
Issues : How to identify classes of cases/user; what variations to impose (and how to implement them); then how to choose randomly among them to implement variation[s]; finally what data to collect [both primary and secondary metrics].
How effective are bots in helping deal with mischief? What strategies can we use to further their effectiveness?
Who typically reverts vandalism? (figures for admins, regular editors, IP editors, bots)
What effects does semi-protection have on levels of contribution and vandalism? Several articles should be studied before protection, during and after.
What level of vandalism is acceptable; at what point is protection warranted?
CanWikiProjects be coordinated withPortals andCategories in a comprehensive way from a more logical focus to help align Wikipedia - The Community with Wikipedia the encyclopedia?discuss
Many different methodologies would be possible and useful.
Some questions can be examined by direct analysis of existingfield data.
Runningrandomized evaluations will facilitate drawing causal inferences about results. A standard way to pre-test possible large-scale innovations in a neutral way is to identify a class of visitors, editors, or pages; select a randomized subset of that class; and introduce a variation to the randomized subset. Then metrics can be evaluated for both the subset and the entire class, and inferences drawn about what effects the variation had.Stratification can increase the statistical power of the evaluation.
Auser survey to which one could add important questions, would help inform background assumptions. Users who do not choose to be wholly anonymous in responding to such a survey could even partake in specialized control groups for some studies.
Pilot studies - running small, short initial studies to provide an example of how to run and evaluate a study; and to iron out implementation details specific to Wikipedia and its community.
Research already going on (other wikiprojects, etc.) in the realm ofweb usability and Wikipedia as a web interface.
Economists study markets in ideas; volunteerism; bargaining; and information. Psychologists study motivation; conflict resolution;.... Sociologists study networks of ideas and people; the culture of organizations; norms of behavior;....
