[Wiki-research-l] Testing ways to make your Wikipedia thrive: Collaborating with CivilServant in 2020

[J. Nathan Matias]

Hi Wiki Research List!

Are you interested to make discoveries that could help your Wiki project
thrive? Let's talk! Or join us for a one-day research summit after
Wikimania on August 19. Funding is available.

CivilServant  is a research nonprofit that works
collaboratively with Wikipedians to test tools and practices designed to
reach the goals those communities care about most. We currently are looking
to add partnerships that start in 2020.

If you are an experienced Wikipedian who has helped lead initiatives in
your language community - or other Wiki project - and you want to help
learn how to make your community stronger, we would love to hear from you.

Are you curious about what tools are effective in reaching your Wikipedia's
goals? Is your community thinking about using a new or existing tool or
practice? We can work with your community to design and run A/B tests to
discover which practices are effective. Along the way, we also hope to
contribute to science!

If you are interested to speak with us, please introduce yourself here
.
We also invite you to participate in a one day Research Summit which will
be held in Stockholm on August 19th
,
the day after Wikimania. We hope to welcome any Wikipedian who is
interested in learning about CivilServant and how to design A/B tests
(given space limitations) .

Funding: We have 10 full scholarships to pay for attendance at the Research
Summit and Wikimania (including airfare & accommodations) as well as 15
partial scholarships to cover the costs of staying in Stockholm two
additional nights to attend the summit. We invite you to apply for either
scholarship here

.

We look forward to hearing from you. If you have questions about
CivilServant's work, please visit our Meta page
 or our
website  where you can read about some of our
previous

studies

with Reddit communities. - or feel free to reach out directly to
CivilServant's research manager, Juliakamin(cs)
.

Finally, if you know other Wikipedians who may be interested to talk with
us, please feel free to forward this email to them.

Thanks!

-- 
J. Nathan Matias  : Princeton University :
CivilServant  : MIT Media Lab : Cornell University
Fall 2019

: @natematias  : blog

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] distinguishing native contributors from helpful strangers

[Kiril Simeonovski]

Hi all,

I think this is an excellent research topic that might give us helpful
insights on how Wikipedias can benefit from the support provided by
non-speakers. Discerning the namespaces where this support ends and whether
it was made by humans or bots may also give highly useful information. My
observations so far regarding any support by the so-called "helpful
strangers" can be summarised in the following conclusions:

* The larger the community size of a Wikipedia, the higher rules-lawyering
applied to the "helpful strangers". This means that:
** Very small Wikipedias (less than 25 active contributors) do not have a
strict set of rules nor a native-speaking contributors to watch and every
kind of support is welcome (mostly in the form of bot-generated articles
and automatic translation of templates).
** Small Wikipedias (from 25-100 active contributors) do have some set of
rules and some native-speaking contributors but most kinds of support are
still welcome.
** Medium-sized Wikipedias (from 100-1,000 active contributors) do have a
clear set of rules and a native-speaking community to take care of
everything; the room for support is limited to human editing that abides
some rules and sometimes community permission is required (mostly comes in
the form of categorisation an correction of templates, while bot-generated
stuff is mostly done by native speakers with a bot flag required for
strangers).
** Large Wikipedias (over 1,000 active contributors) do have rules about
things that could have not been imagined and native-speaking community that
easily manages the fields where the strangers could help in, making them
not attractive for non-native speakers to come in and help.

Another dimension could be a research on the block log of the "helpful
strangers" that might explain how these contributors are accepted by the
communities they are helping to.

Best regards,
Kiril

On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 13:24 Andy Mabbett  wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 09:42, Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
>
> > There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity
> > level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make
> > meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of
> people
> > from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the
> > knowledge of the language is relatively high.
>
> > Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but these are
> > just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify
> this
> > more precisely?
>
> It won't answer the question fully, but you can narrow down the
> results by looking at babel templates to see which languages they
> self-rate as being proficient in, or otherwise, on their home
> project(s).
>
> I try to act as a "helpful stranger" on non-English projects, for
> instance by adding images and {{Authority control}} templates. This is
> usually well received, but there are a couple of projects where the
> former at least is apparently not welcome, and I've recently been
> blocked (with no warning; my talk page ink is still red), with no talk
> page or email access, on Lithuanian Wikipedia. In 2015 I was accused
> of "vandalism" and "trolling" there.
>
> Happy to discuss my experiences - good and bad - off-list, if that
> will help your research.
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] distinguishing native contributors from helpful strangers

[Andy Mabbett]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 09:42, Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:

> There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity
> level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make
> meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of people
> from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the
> knowledge of the language is relatively high.

> Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but these are
> just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify this
> more precisely?

It won't answer the question fully, but you can narrow down the
results by looking at babel templates to see which languages they
self-rate as being proficient in, or otherwise, on their home
project(s).

I try to act as a "helpful stranger" on non-English projects, for
instance by adding images and {{Authority control}} templates. This is
usually well received, but there are a couple of projects where the
former at least is apparently not welcome, and I've recently been
blocked (with no warning; my talk page ink is still red), with no talk
page or email access, on Lithuanian Wikipedia. In 2015 I was accused
of "vandalism" and "trolling" there.

Happy to discuss my experiences - good and bad - off-list, if that
will help your research.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia search queries log

[S. Nunes]

Hi Leila,

Thanks for your prompt feedback.
I'll prepare and send you a proposal directly.

Regards,

On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 3:44 PM Leila Zia  wrote:
>
> Hi Sérgio,
>
> If your proposal is aligned with the annual plan for Wikimedia
> Foundation's Research team for the next year (still in the process of
> being finalized), we can consider an NDA through Research. If you want
> me to review it, please send a proposal to me directly. I will only
> commit to picking up the review after June 30.
>
> If you want to directly contact the Search Platform team, please check
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform#Communications
> for some ways to connect with them.
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 4:42 AM S. Nunes  wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Does anybody knows who to contact to request access to Wikipedia search
> > logs?
> >
> > I am aware of the previous effort made to make this information public and
> > the privacy problems involved [1]. Nonetheless, I think that there is a lot
> > of space for research without publicly disclosing the dataset, namely
> > through NDAs.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your help.
> >
> > [1]
> > http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/19/what-are-readers-looking-for-wikipedia-
> > search-data-now-available/
> >
> > --
> > Sérgio Nunes
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] distinguishing native contributors from helpful strangers

[Marc Miquel]

Hi Amir,

This is an interesting idea. I haven't found a way to detect whether an
editor is native or not. My approach to multingual editing is through the
concept of having a primary-non primary Wikipedias. Your primary Wikipedia
is the one where you have made more edits to (and you are a primary editor
there). In the rest of Wikipedias where you have at least an edit, you are
a non-primary editor.

I'm currently creating a database in which for every Wikipedia I have a
table with a column specifying whether an editor is primary from this
language or non-primary, another one with the primary language, another one
with how many other languages they interacted with and a final one with the
total number of edits in all languages.

An editor behaves quite differently when he is primary or non-primary in
terms of social interactions, topical diversity, etc. To me, this is
interesting because it allows me to detect when an editor "exports" content
(edits content about their local area, usually politics-related content, in
other languages).

Assessing the impact of these "technical helpful editors" may not be easy
as we'd need to examine the characteristics of the edits. However,
quantifying the extent of edits made by non-primary editors is doable.
Would that help you?

Best,

Marc Miquel

Missatge de Amir E. Aharoni  del dia dc., 5
de juny 2019 a les 10:54:

> Hi,
>
> There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity
> level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make
> meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of people
> from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the
> knowledge of the language is relatively high.
>
> I call the latter group "helpful strangers". They can do things such as
> fixing categories, fixing invalid wiki syntax, editing templates, adding
> images, etc.—things that don't require knowing the language well, and can
> be achieved by copying and pasting, by guessing things from interlanguage
> links, or by writing language-neutral things, such as numbers or filenames.
>
> Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but these are
> just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify this
> more precisely?
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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[Wiki-research-l] distinguishing native contributors from helpful strangers

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi,

There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity
level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make
meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of people
from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the
knowledge of the language is relatively high.

I call the latter group "helpful strangers". They can do things such as
fixing categories, fixing invalid wiki syntax, editing templates, adding
images, etc.—things that don't require knowing the language well, and can
be achieved by copying and pasting, by guessing things from interlanguage
links, or by writing language-neutral things, such as numbers or filenames.

Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but these are
just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify this
more precisely?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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