Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-04-25/Recent research

Recent research

Quality of aquatic and anatomical articles

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

How aquatic scientists improve Wikipedia

An article in Limnology and Oceanography Letters reports on the activities of WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography (WP L&O), founded in 2018 by "a group of early career aquatic scientists" concerned about "inadequate representation of aquatic information on Wikipedia":

The open access paper contains the following helpful overview of "ways to promote more equitable dissemination of aquatic scientific information through Wikipedia":

See also an earlier paper involving some of the same authors: "Ripples on the web: Spreading lake information via Wikipedia"

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.

"The Quality and Readability of English Wikipedia Anatomy Articles"

From the abstract:

"Wikipedia Edit-a-thons as Sites of Public Pedagogy"

From the abstract:

(The paper also cites two earlier reports by the Wikimedia Foundation related to the topic [1] [2].)

"How trust in Wikipedia evolves: a survey of students aged 11 to 25"

From the abstract:

From the "Results and findings" section:

See also our review of a related earlier paper involving one of the authors: "Wikipedia: An opportunity to rethink the links between sources’ credibility, trust, and authority"

"How do academic topics shift across altmetric sources? A case study of the research area of Big Data"

From the paper (preprint version):

IMGpedia: Enriching Wikimedia Commons images with metadata from DBpedia and Wikidata

The IMGpedia dataset "brings together descriptors of the visual content of 15 million images [from Wikimedia Commons], 450 million visual-similarity relations between those images, links to image metadata from DBpedia Commons, and links to the DBpedia resources associated with individual images [as well as links to Wikidata, in a later version]. It allows people to perform visuo-semantic queries over the images." It is the topic of several academic publications:

A 2017 conference paper and thesis, which - as summarized in the abstract

A 2018 conference paper titled "Querying Wikimedia Images Using Wikidata Facts" reports on enhancements:

The IMGpedia dataset has also been published, but appears to have been removed since.

See also the "Structured data on Commons" project, a separate effort

"Inauthentic Editing: Changing Wikipedia to Win Elections and Influence People"

This is the topic of two blog posts published by the Stanford Internet Observatory earlier this year (on occasion of Wikipedia's 20th birthday):

The studied example involved conflict-of-interest editing in the article about Canadian politician John Horgan.

In the second post, the student authors provide a detailed overview of how to investigate such cases based on Wikipedia's publicly available data and tools. As summarized by one of the authors:

References

Supplementary references and notes:

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25 April 2021 (all comments)

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I often coach at edit-a-thons and am perennially annoyed that most have a theme of making new biographies. Twice wrong. First, biographies are already, to my mind, a disproportionate fraction of articles. Second, Wikipedia would be more improved by making existing articles, even biographies, better, than by adding more bad ones that few would read. My guess is, it's done this way because new biographies attract more prospective editors, which reminds me of the old adage that small minds talk about people; mediocre minds talk about events, and great minds talk about ideas. Better if we could find a way to stretch those minds to reach above pettiness and into mediocrity, and maybe even touch greatness occasionally. Pleasant to see that some efforts in a fairly small, poorly covered, and lightly read branch of science have been modestly successful, and I wish this could become a trend. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:15, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- So, so true. Partly the emphasis on biographies I think reflects the emphasis on the gender gap, and using editathons to encourage specifically female editors, who are (rather patronizingly perhaps) assumed to want to write about women. Partly it has now become a habit. But there's no doubt new editors like to see a new article that is "theirs". Johnbod (talk) 14:05, 28 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - I think part of the draw of bios (especially BLPs) is that they can feel like a lower level of technical expertise is needed (e.g. students are usually more comfortable writing a BLP than about some scientific topic) and the human angle is itself a draw in and of itself to participants. It's a pity because they're so much harder to write than other articles and can give new editors a negative experience. I'm actually in the process of organising a biography-writing editathon with my uni, but I'd like to follow it up with a editathons focused on non-bio articles. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 09:59, 3 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
How does this compare to the rest of the encyclopedia? About 58% of assessed, non-list articles are marked as stubs. I'd be curious about the evidence that Limnology/Oceanography coverage suffers any more than any other topic area. czar 02:28, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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