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 <a...@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 09:42, Amir E. Aharoni
> <amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> 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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