Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki history of one article on War of 1812: rjensen responds
Hi Richard, I'd say there were many overlapping roles in Wikipedia, and those of us who take on the tasks of keeping the pedia free of vandalism and spam are probably more likely to do so under a pseudonym. I'd certainly recommend that those who edit under their own names don't get involved in the deleting of attack pages and certain other tasks that annoy hotheads. Ignoring death threats is so much easier when you know they can't find you. As a community we also have a strong skew towards introversion, and I suspect this has some correlation with those who choose anonymity or pseudonymity. But as with credentials there are problems with half measures. Most people will recognise WereSpielChequers as an obvious pseudonym, but we have had people edit under pseudonyms that appear to be real names, including some of our most disruptive editors. Perhaps that would make a good topic for a researcher some time. As for credentials there is the legacy of the Essjay incident. Those who want to assert their professional qualifications are of course free to out themselves completely - I've known editors whose userpage mutually links to a profile at their university. But anyone asserting that their view should prevail because they have a relevant qualification may have a credibility issue if they aren't prepared to create such a link. The Article Feedback tool is covered at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Feedback_Tool personally I'm far from being a fan. I fear it will divert people from improving articles to commenting on them, the designers seem to have ignored the cost in volunteer time of wading through huge piles of crud to find the useful comments and it is an annoyingly large box that disfigures articles. But it is a major community attempt to get feedback from our readers, and its critics don't dispute that we want to serve our readers better. We just don't see the value in endless pages of OMG dontcha just luv him comments. As for the focus on readers, most of the writers who I have chatted with about their motivation are very much motivated to communicate topics that are important to them to their readers. Some consider that what is important to them is or should be important to everyone. Others can be very frank in acknowledging that if they were being paid to write then they wouldn't be paid to write about their topic. , The difficulty when it comes to deciding important topics is that we can't agree what the important articles are. Some consider the important ones to be those that other encyclopaedias cover, others would judge by transient fame and look at numbers of reads or numbers of searches. All those methods have their problems, I'm happy to concede that an article on a fairly minor popstar will get more readers in the next year than an article on an English Hill fort. But the Hill fort will still be there in a thousand years, and if you measure readership over a long enough period then relative importance will look very different. That isn't to say that we don't have institutional biases, but we need to work with the grain of the community. Here in London we seem to be able to get volunteers to do outreach to some very disparate people, and IMHO that is one of the tricks to improving our coverage of areas where we are weak. Can we have volunteers to spend an afternoon talking to some people from such and such an institution is a much easier sell than your topic isn't important, please write about this other topic instead. WSC On 6 September 2012 09:27, Richard Jensen rjen...@uic.edu wrote: THANKS to WSC Those are good points -- I have a few days to make edits to the page proofs; the article will appear in Oct 2012 J Military History. Comments: I have not seen any editor make actual use of the Article Feedback tool -- are there examples? Yes Wikipedians are very proud of their vast half-billion-person audience. However they do not ask what features are most useful for a high school student or teacher/ a university student/ etc As for who does the work, I looked closely at the big military articles especially 1812, also WWI, WW2, Am Civil War, Am Revolution and found that the occasional editors IP's contributed very little useful content. That is also my experience with the political articles on presidents prime ministers main political parties. Boasting like Mike Fink?-- well I read 500+ requests for access to Questia, Highbeam etc. and looked for what boasts editors actually make. As for higher degrees and scholarly publications, that does not cut much mustard on talk pages. Very few editors -- maybe 2%--mention their professional expertise on their user pages. Fewer than 1% give real names that would permit validation of their claims. in Academe these rates would be 99% In a larger sense (but it's not in my article), perhaps there are two wiki communities, one for law enforcement one for content. That is, we have vigilantes policing
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki history of one article on War of 1812: rjensen responds
THANKS to WSC Those are good points -- I have a few days to make edits to the page proofs; the article will appear in Oct 2012 J Military History. Comments: I have not seen any editor make actual use of the Article Feedback tool -- are there examples? Yes Wikipedians are very proud of their vast half-billion-person audience. However they do not ask what features are most useful for a high school student or teacher/ a university student/ etc As for who does the work, I looked closely at the big military articles especially 1812, also WWI, WW2, Am Civil War, Am Revolution and found that the occasional editors IP's contributed very little useful content. That is also my experience with the political articles on presidents prime ministers main political parties. Boasting like Mike Fink?-- well I read 500+ requests for access to Questia, Highbeam etc. and looked for what boasts editors actually make. As for higher degrees and scholarly publications, that does not cut much mustard on talk pages. Very few editors -- maybe 2%--mention their professional expertise on their user pages. Fewer than 1% give real names that would permit validation of their claims. in Academe these rates would be 99% In a larger sense (but it's not in my article), perhaps there are two wiki communities, one for law enforcement one for content. That is, we have vigilantes policing the encyclopedia and ranchers herding ideas and moving them to market. (I would use the farmer metaphor but growing a new crop sounds too much like OR). The cash market, however, consists of praise from other ranchers (as in FA), not from the half-billion customers whose opinion about the beef is not of interest. At 05:59 PM 9/5/2012, you wrote: Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few things, though its possible that some may simply be that you are writing in American English. The article itself runs 14,000 words - suggest The article itself runs to 14,000 words That perspective is not of much concern inside Wikipedia, for it is operated by and for the benefit of the editors.i Only readers who write comments are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand comments. That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns that we don't know enough as to what our readers want, however one of the primary motives of most editors that I know is to make humanity's knowledge freely available to the world, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdfpage=8http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdfpage=8 and I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the number of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more readers such as getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own later comment Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened up a very large, new audience being a typical Wikipedian sentiment. Neither of which accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its editors. If you've found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's academic critics it might be worth balancing that with information on the readership survey http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_surveyhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey and the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find out what our readers want. I suspect that such criticisms also pre-date developments such as the Article Feedback tool. That task is handled by the Wikipedia community, which in practice means a self-selected group of a couple thousand editors. As well as adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most of the vandal fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam deletion is done a relatively small community of a few thousand. But the people who add content are an overlapping and rather larger group. How you measure the size of the community is complex, and many people ignore the IP editors who actually write a large part of the content and focus on the currently active editors who have done over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400 or so that group isn't far from being a couple of thousand. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm But it is much larger when you consider the number of people who have contributed content in the past but may be less active now. Our 2,000 most active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little over a year ago, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.pnghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.png but even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits such as typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: That task is handled by the Wikipedia community, which in practice means a self-selected group of a few thousand frequent
[Wiki-research-l] Wiki history of one article on War of 1812
I have an essay that has just been accepted by the Journal of Military History on Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812 It deals with the history of the War of 1812 article on Wikipedia, in context of military history and how Wikipedia operates. http://www.americanhistoryprojects.com/downloads/6jensen-1812.docx I would welcome any feedback. Richard Jensen rjen...@uic.edu User:Rjensen ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki history of one article on War of 1812
Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few things, though its possible that some may simply be that you are writing in American English. The article itself runs 14,000 words - suggest The article itself runs to 14,000 words That perspective is not of much concern inside Wikipedia, for it is operated by and for the benefit of the editors.i #sdendnote1sym Only readers who write comments are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand comments. That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns that we don't know enough as to what our readers want, however one of the primary motives of most editors that I know is to make humanity's knowledge freely available to the world, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdfpage=8and I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the number of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more readers such as getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own later comment Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened up a very large*,*new audience * being a typical Wikipedian sentiment.* Neither of which accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its editors. If you've found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's academic critics it might be worth balancing that with information on the readership survey http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey and the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find out what our readers want. I suspect that such criticisms also pre-date developments such as the Article Feedback tool. That task is handled by the “Wikipedia community,” which in practice means a self-selected group of a couple thousand editors. As well as adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most of the vandal fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam deletion is done a relatively small community of a few thousand. But the people who add content are an overlapping and rather larger group. How you measure the size of the community is complex, and many people ignore the IP editors who actually write a large part of the content and focus on the currently active editors who have done over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400 or so that group isn't far from being a couple of thousand. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm But it is much larger when you consider the number of people who have contributed content in the past but may be less active now. Our 2,000 most active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little over a year ago, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.pngbut even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits such as typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: That task is handled by the “Wikipedia community,” which in practice means a self-selected group of a few thousand frequent editors and a much larger number of occasional participants. Wikipedia editors almost never claim authorship of published scholarly books and articles. That sort of expertise is not welcome in Wikipedia; editors rarely mention they possess advanced training or degrees According to the editor survey 26% of our editors have either a masters or a PhD. Academic expertise is highly valued in Wikipedia, but it is best demonstrated by the quality of ones edits and especially your sourcing. Afterall most of our editors are here to share their expertise http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdfpage=8 Wikipedia editors will boast like river boatmen about their output: how many years they have worked on the encyclopedia, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of edits they have made. There is some truth in that, but in terms of status within the community featured article contributions are a higher value currency than either tenure or edit count. They do not gain by selling their product, and anyone suspected of writing articles for pay on behalf public relations for an entity comes under deep suspicion.i #sdendnote1sym As a result how many people read an article, or how its audience has grown or fallen, or how useful it has been to the general public are not among the criteria used to evaluate quality. That's an interesting synthesis, there certainly is a distrust of those who edit for pay, especially if they are from the PR industry. But I would suggest that the distrust is more a product of people's experience with editors who have difficulty writing neutrally about topics that they are being paid to promote. A couple of good contrasts were mentioned in the translation sessions at Wikimania in Gdansk in 2010, Google and its charity arm Google org both presented about paid editing they'd commissioned in Indic languages. The uncontentious operation was done by the charity arm, translating English Wikipedia articles on medical articles into various south Asian Wikipedia versions. Rather more
