Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-11-29/Recent research
Wikipedia's Shoah coverage succeeds where libraries fail
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Wikipedia succeeds where libraries fail, showing "an unmet interest" in the Shoah and Israel, also in Muslim countries
In a paper titled "The Political Geography of Shoah Knowledge and Awareness, Estimated from the Analysis of Global Library Catalogues and Wikipedia User Statistics" Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch finds a disturbing "global North-South and North-East divide in the library presence of Shoah-related titles", contrasting it with "a more optimistic [trend], based on freely available information on the internet" – namely the availability and popularity of Wikipedia articles about the same topic in multiple languages. For example, the study highlights their pageview numbers in the Farsi, Arabic and Indonesian Wikipedias as "truly a hopeful sign".
The bulk of the paper consists of detailed bibliometric examinations:
The author contrasts this with webometrics, where "we must regard Wikipedia download statistics [i.e. page view data] as a first and very reliable seismograph of global social network trend ... Its 49.3 million articles in almost 300 languages are therefore also a treasure trove for the research on Judaism, Israel, the memory of the victims of the Shoah, and global anti-Semitism. ....[To] estimate whether or not a given language community on Wikipedia has a high or a low relative tendency to seek information on the Shoah", he compares the pageview numbers for the corresponding article with the annual pageview numbers for the entire Wikipedia in that language, or alternatively with "the culturally most neutral article in this context, the Wikipedia article on the encyclopedia Wikipedia itself."
The paper's detailed bibliometric studies contain many observations on particular countries or regions, e.g. "Among the countries holding less than 100 titles in their combined entire countrywide library system, we find countries where considerable numbers of Jews were sent to the Nazi German death camps".
While praising Wikipedia as an information source with more even coverage (across languages or countries), the author still notes that "compared to the presumed size of the Wikipedia user community [i.e. total pageview numbers], the Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, Persian, and French speaking Wikipedia users had a higher tendency to download the main Shoah Wikipedia article. Results for the Wikipedia downloads in Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, Polish, Korean, Ukrainian, Czech, Finnish, English, Indonesian, Arabic, and Dutch (in descending order) were below the trend." The study similarly examines the article about Israel, observing e.g. that "With 844 daily downloads of the Israel article in Persian and 1,254 daily downloads of the Israel article in Arabic, a certain presence of the theme of Israel among Wikipedia audiences in the Middle East has now been achieved."
The article was published in a journal of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think-tank which (according to the English Wikipedia article about it) "is considered to be politically neo-conservative". That said, few of the author's previous publications appear to have focused on topics related to the Holocaust or the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Libraries and their biases are the main focus of the paper, with the Wikipedia-related results occupying a smaller part. Still, the former are of interest to Wikimedians and Wikipedia researchers as well - for example as evidence for possible risks in GLAM-WIKI collaborations, where the biases and political constraints of such cultural institutions might negatively affect Wikipedia's efforts to achieve a neutral point of view.
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
"NwQM: A neural quality assessment framework for Wikipedia"
From the abstract:
"Evidence of a mostly productive and continuous effort to improve the quality of references" on English Wikipedia
From the abstract:
"The network structure of scientific revolutions"
From the abstract:
"Using logical constraints to validate information in collaborative knowledge graphs: a study of COVID-19 on Wikidata"
From the abstract:
"PNEL: Pointer Network based End-To-End Entity Linking over Knowledge Graphs"
From the abstract:
"A decade of writing on Wikipedia: A comparative study of three articles"
From the abstract:
Discuss this story
I think "Shoah", the Hebrew term for "The Holocaust", is a lot more obscure in the English-speaking world than, well, "The Holocaust". Obviously, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with calling it "Shoah", but it's probably best to gloss it at the first use. The research is interesting, but the presentation seems a little reader-unfriendly. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.7% of all FPs 01:31, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]