Wikipedia Contributors Research Articles

Bridging the offline and online: 20 years of offline meeting data of the German-language Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites worldwide. Thousands of volunteers are contributing to it daily, making it an example of how productive non-market collaboration on a very wide scale is not only viable but also sustainable. Wikipedia’s freely available data on the online actions conducted make it a popular source of data, particularly for computer scientists and computational social scientists. This data brief will present the dewiki meetupdataset which covers the offline component of the German-language version of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia: informal offline gatherings between Wikipedia contributors. These gatherings are organised online and information about who is attending them, where they take place and what has happened at these meetings is shared publicly. The dewiki meetup dataset covers almost 20 years of offline activity of the German-language Wikipedia, containing 4418 meetups that have been organised with information on attendees, apologies, date and place of meeting, and minutes recorded. It is a valuable source of data for social science research: it captures the development of the offline network over time of one of the largest and most sustainable online public goods and communities. The data can easily be merged with online activity data on Wikipedia which allows us to bridge the gap between offline and online behaviour.

“Gua means scrape”: a conversation analysis of identity construction and negotiation in polylogal Wikipedia paratext

ABSTRACT This article contributes to multidisciplinary research exploring the role played by paratext in the construction of identities. First, it develops a theoretical and methodological framework inspired by recent scholarship on conducting conversation analysis in digital contexts and on the ways in which speakers claim positions of expertise through their turns-at-talk. Next, it presents a case study examining translation-focused discussion forum comments posted within the so-called “Talk” pages that surround the mainspace content of the online user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia. The analysis highlights the often intensely interactive nature of digital paratext and probes the implications for participants’ identity work: I argue that the polylogal nature of this paratextual space requires the constant negotiation of identities as Wikipedia contributors relentlessly jostle with one another for recognition of their epistemic authority. In the final section, I discuss the implications of this Wikipedia case for broader areas of scholarship on translation and digital paratext.

Advanced processing of differential phase contrast data: Distinction between different causes of electron phase shifts

Differential phase contrast, in its high resolution modification also known as first moment microscopy or momentum resolved STEM [1–7] , basically measures the lateral momentum transfer to the electron probe due to the beam interaction with either electrostatic and/or magnetic fields, when the probe transmits the specimen. In other words, the result of the measurement is a vector field p→(x,y) which describes the lateral momentum transfer to the probe electrons. In the case of electric fields, this momentum transfer is easily converted to the electric field E→(x,y) causing the deflection, and from ϱ=ɛ0∇⋅E→ the local charge density can be calculated from the divergence of the electric field.However, from experimental data it is known that also the calculation of the vector field’s curl ∇→×p→ in general yields non-zero results. In this paper, we use the Helmholtz decomposition (Wikipedia contributors, 2022), also known as the fundamental theorem of vector calculus, to split the measured vector fields into their curl-free and divergence-free components and to interpret the physical meaning of these components in detail. It will be shown, that non-zero curl components may be used to measure geometric phases occurring from irregularities in crystal structure such as a screw dislocation.

A game-theoretic analysis of Wikipedia's peer production: The interplay between community's governance and contributors' interactions.

Peer production, such as the collaborative authoring of Wikipedia articles, involves both cooperation and competition between contributors. Cooperatively, Wikipedia's contributors attempt to create high-quality articles, and at the same time, they compete to align Wikipedia articles with their personal perspectives and "take ownership" of the article. This process is governed collectively by the community, which works to ensure the neutrality of the content. We study the interplay between individuals' cooperation and competition, considering the community's endeavor to ensure a neutral point of view (NPOV) on articles. We develop a two-level game-theoretic model: the first level models the interactions between individual contributors who seek both cooperative and competitive goals and the second level models governance of co-production as a Stackelberg (leader-follower) game between contributors and the communal neutrality-enforcing mechanisms. We present our model's predictions regarding the relationship between contributors' personal benefits of content ownership and their characteristics, namely their cooperative/competitive orientation and their activity profile (whether creators or curators of content). We validate the model's prediction through an empirical analysis, by studying the interactions of 219,811 distinct contributors that co-produced 864 Wikipedia articles over a decade. The analysis and empirical results suggest that the factor that determines who ends up owning content is the ratio between one's cooperative/competitive orientation (estimated based on whether a core or peripheral community member) and the contributor's creator/curator activity profile (proxied through average edit size per sentence). Namely, under the governance mechanisms, the fractional content that is eventually owned by a contributor is higher for curators that have a competitive orientation. Although neutrality-seeking mechanisms are essential for ensuring that ownership is not concentrated within a small number of contributors, our findings suggest that the burden of excessive governance may deter contributors from participating, and thus indirectly curtail the peer production of high-quality articles.

Some Structural Properties of the Generalized Kumaraswamy (GKw) $q_T-X$ Class of Distributions

Ampadu [1] introduced quantile generated probability distributions as a new way to generate continuous distributions. Combining this idea with the two-parameter Kumaraswamy (Kw) distribution, for example, see Wikipedia contributors [15], this paper introduces a so-called (GKw) $q_T-X$ class of distributions, and obtains some of their structural properties. Practicality of sub-models of this new class of distributions is shown to be effective in modeling real life data. Practicality to various disciplines is proposed as further investigation. A bivariate extension of this new class of distribution is also proposed, and the reader is asked to investigate its properties and applications.

Evaluating the effectiveness of automatic image captioning for web accessibility

The web has become a fundamental tool for carrying out many activities spanning from education to work and private life. For this reason, it must be accessible to every user regardless of any form of impairment or disability. Images on the web are a primary means for communicating information, and specific HTML elements were defined to enrich images with textual descriptions, which can be read aloud by screen readers or rendered by braille displays. A relevant problem is that adding a text describing each image published on a website is a demanding task requiring a non-negligible effort for web developers. Several tools based on machine learning have emerged, which can automatically return descriptions for the images. In this work, we evaluate the correctness of their outputs by comparing the generated descriptions with human-defined references. More specifically, we selected 60 images from Wikipedia and their corresponding descriptions as defined by Wikipedia contributors. We then generated the corresponding descriptions employing four state of the art tools (Azure Computer Vision Engine, Amazon Rekognition, Cloudsight, and Auto Alt-Text for Google Chrome) and asked 76 computer science students to blindly evaluate the perceived correctness of the descriptions without being aware of their source. The results show that the descriptions available in Wikipedia are still perceived as the best ones. However, some tools generate good results for specific categories of images, and they can represent proper candidates for the automated and massive addition of image descriptions to websites, helping to increase the accessibility level of the web drastically.

A decade of writing on Wikipedia

This article reports what observable writing activities characterized three Wikipedia articles, archive, design, and writing, over a three-year period from 2012–2014. It then compares these results to writing in these same three articles 10 years earlier, from 2002–2004. Results show that articles were longer and more referenced in 2012–2014. The most frequent written contributions in 2012–2014 were adding and deleting content, followed by vandalizing and reverting vandalism. Ten years earlier, content addition was likewise the most frequent activity, though vandalism and its removal were not found. The least frequent written contributions in 2012–2014 were organizing and formatting content. Both activities occurred more often 10 years earlier. The number of contributors grew significantly in 2012–2014, though during both time periods approximately ¾ of participants contributed only once. These results support that writing in Wikipedia continues to support notions of revision and collaboration valued in the discipline of writing studies. However, the revision and collaboration that occurred were limited. Thus, more robust approaches to these concepts are needed when using Wikipedia to teach writing. More broadly, Wikipedia contributors need to focus more on organizing and formatting article content for readers.

‘This is exactly how the Nazis ran it’: (De)legitimising the EU on Wikipedia

This article addresses how the Wikipedia community has grappled with controversial elements of the European Union’s (EU) history from 2001 to 2019. It also examines what perspective on the EU the Wikipedia editors develop in debates about the institution’s history and if/how the community has (de)legitimised the EU’s existence today in the context of discussions about the EU’s predecessors. The data examined consist of Wikipedia contributors’ debates that took place on a Wikipedia discussion site (‘talk page’). Taking a corpus-assisted approach combined with argumentation analysis and aspects of systemic functional linguistics, I found that Wikipedia editors repeatedly propose that Nazi Germany might have been a precursor of the EU today. However, the Wikipedia community ultimately rejects this notion and emphasises the voluntary nature guiding the EU’s creation process. Thus, while the EU’s legitimacy is indeed contested in the course of the debates, the Wikipedia community eventually rejects this challenge.

'WP2Cochrane', a tool linking Wikipedia to the Cochrane Library: Results of a bibliometric analysis evaluating article quality and importance.

Medical information on English Wikipedia was accessed over 2 billion times in 2018. Our goal was to develop an automated system to assist Wikipedia volunteers to improve articles with high-quality sources from journals such as The Cochrane Library. We created an automated indexing system by linking available reviews from the Cochrane library with disease-related Wikipedia articles and evaluating the relationship between the quality and importance of these articles with the number of relevant and cited Cochrane reviews. We first conducted a bibliometric analysis, identifying disease-related Wikipedia articles and relevant/cited Cochrane reviews. Citations were thematically coded, and descriptive statistics were calculated. Finally, separate multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted for article quality and importance. The indexing system identified 4381 disease-related Wikipedia articles, 1193 (27%) of which cited a Cochrane review. Higher quality Wikipedia articles were more likely to cite a Cochrane review (p = 0.002), while lower quality articles were less likely to cite a Cochrane review (p < 0.0005). A greater number of Cochrane reviews are available for more 'important' Wikipedia articles (p < 0.005), and these articles were more likely to cite a Cochrane review (p < 0.005). This approach to an indexing system can be leveraged by Wikipedia contributors and editors seeking to update disease-related Wikipedia articles with relevant Cochrane reviews (thus improving their quality), and online information seekers in need of additional information to supplement their Wikipedia search.

On Black Wikipedians: Motivations behind content contribution

Despite a growing body of scholarship on Wikipedia very few studies focus on motivational factors that compel underrepresented populations to contribute to the online encyclopedia. This study examines the information behavior of Black Wikipedians by examining a proposed research model that considers black altruism and perceptions of information quality among factors that drive content contribution. Data were collected from an online survey of 318 Black identified Wikipedia contributors and analyzed using Partial Least Squares (PLS), a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique, to measure the degree of association among factors. Results show that content contribution among Black Wikipedians is driven by self-interest and contributors’ perceptions of information quality on Wikipedia. Social presence and black altruism also have significant but indirect influences on Black Wikipedians’ content contribution. Our proposed research model for content contribution is statistically validated.

“The right information”: perceptions of information bias among Black Wikipedians

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine motivators that drive Black Wikipedia contribution. The authors explore motivations around content contribution, effects of gender on motivations and self-perceptions of Black Wikipedia labor.Design/methodology/approachA total of 318 Black American Wikipedia contributors completed an online survey. The authors employed both quantitative and qualitative methods in the study including descriptive statistics, multivariate (MANOVA) and univariate (ANOVA) analysis of variance to examine gender differences in Wikipedia content contribution. In addition, open-ended responses were evaluated, through content analysis, to make inferences on their perceptions of Wikipedia labor.FindingsThis paper identifies racial identity and perceptions of information quality as strong motivators in content contribution among Black Wikipedians. Motivators are gender variant; men are more motivated than women with the lone exception being racial identity. Additionally, the study identifies Wikipedia as a contested space among Black contributors and is a site of resistance.Originality/valueBlack Wikipedians information activity is a relatively new and understudied phenomenon. This paper presents new insight and a deeper understanding of Black Wikipedians’ motivations for information sharing behaviors in the most popular encyclopedia on the internet.

Eliciting New Wikipedia Users’ Interests via Automatically Mined Questionnaires: For a Warm Welcome, Not a Cold Start

Every day, thousands of users sign up as new Wikipedia contributors. Once joined, these users have to decide which articles to contribute to, which users to seek out and learn from or collaborate with, etc. Any such task is a hard and potentially frustrating one given the sheer size of Wikipedia. Supporting newcomers in their first steps by recommending articles they would enjoy editing or editors they would enjoy collaborating with is thus a promising route toward converting them into long-term contributors. Standard recommender systems, however, rely on users’ histories of previous interactions with the platform. As such, these systems cannot make high-quality recommendations to newcomers without any previous interactions—the so-called cold-start problem. The present paper addresses the cold-start problem on Wikipedia by developing a method for automatically building short questionnaires that, when completed by a newly registered Wikipedia user, can be used for a variety of purposes, including article recommendations that can help new editors get started. Our questionnaires are constructed based on the text of Wikipedia articles as well as the history of contributions by the already onboarded Wikipedia editors. We assess the quality of our questionnaire-based recommendations in an offline evaluation using historical data, as well as an online evaluation with hundreds of real Wikipedia newcomers, concluding that our method provides cohesive, human-readable questions that perform well against several baselines. By addressing the cold-start problem, this work can help with the sustainable growth and maintenance of Wikipedia’s diverse editor community.

Breaking news on Wikipedia: collaborating, collating and competing

When a major global news event occurs, such as the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka or the March shootings in New Zealand, Wikipedia contributors from around the world come together in a virtual newsroom to craft a narrative, followed closely by readers seeking the latest information. In any given month, the site’s most popular articles — both in number of views and number of edits — are those reporting breaking news. Wikipedia’s protocols of ‘no original research’ mean the contributors must draw on the work of journalists, collating and re-purposing what has been published online. Taking as a case study the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis this paper analyzes Wikipedia’s breaking news practices and the ways the Internet is changing perceptions of news.

The free encyclopedia that anyone can dispute: An analysis of the micro-structural dynamics of positive and negative relations in the production of contentious Wikipedia articles

We consider two rival hypotheses on the emergence of organization in open production communities. According to the first (“reputation hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants in open production communities are explained by differences in individual reputation for quality of contribution. The reputation hypothesis predicts that participants will tend to agree with more reputable others and disagree with less reputable others thus contributing to establish a stable open production community. According to the second hypothesis (“balance hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement are explained by membership in sub-communities of “friends” and “enemies.” The balance hypothesis predicts that participants in open production communities will agree mainly with friends and disagree mainly with enemies, regardless of considerations about reputation for the quality of their contributions. In this paper, we examine which one of these hypotheses is more consistent with patterns of positive and negative interaction events observed during the production of the complete set of 1,206 English-language Wikipedia articles officially considered controversial. We specify and estimate new models for signed and weighted relational event networks predicting the probability that a user deletes the contributions of another user – thus expressing personal disagreement – and/or protects the contributions of another user against deletion from third parties – thus expressing personal agreement. In an analysis of positive and negative interaction among Wikipedia contributors consisting of more than 60 million observations, we find strong support for the balance hypothesis and for the predictions of the reputation hypothesis that are more consistent with alter-centric interpretations of social status as conferred by alters through observable acts of deference.

Propagation of Cannabis sativa for commercial production©

Cannabis sativa (“cannabis”) has historically been an important crop. Its potential for use is not limited to agricultural uses, but also includes chemical, medicinal, and commercial uses. Cannabis sativa is a semi-herbaceous, annual, dioecious flowering herb, with three subspecies: sativa, indica, and ruderalis (Wikipedia Contributors, 2016). There is a high emphasis and importance on plant sex, depending on crop usage. Mature plant size can range from 0.6 to 1.8 m (2 to 6 ft). The leaves are compound and decussate-opposite, with leaves having three to seven leaflets, a serrate leaf margin, and a glabrous or pubescent leaf surface. Mature plants develop a woody stem, then flower, and finally senesce. Cannabis sativa is native to most humid and temperate parts of the world, and its use dates to ancient times (Clarke, 2016). Propagation of C. sativa includes both sexual and asexual propagation methods, two of which will be discussed. The three primary methods used for propagation of C. sativa are: 1) clonal propagation of leafy cuttings in sterile medium (rockwool), 2) rooting of leafy cuttings in an aeroponic machine, and 3) seed germination (Hartmann and Kester, 1975).

50/50 Norm in Massive Online Public Good: The Case of Wikipedia

This paper shows the existence of a strong social norm in a massive online public good community, demonstrated by the choice of the equal split in the Dictator Game (DG). With the help of the French Wikimedia Foundation, we questioned a large sample of Wikipedia users and contributors on their practices, and then asked them to play the DG. The results are statistically significant and show how people respect (or not) social norms. They also show that both contributors and non-contributors adhere to a norm that it is correlated with their “patronage” of Wikipedia. Regular, long-term users, who declare a strong attachment to the platform, are more likely to choose the 50/50 split in the DG. The method of instrumental variables was used to identify a causal relationship between the equal split and involvement in Wikipedia. This did not invalidate the hypothesis that choosing an equal split in the DG is driven by the level of involvement in Wikipedia.

Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia.

The impressive success of peer production – a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions – is difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. The aim of this paper is to study the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new peer production economy. We provide the first field test of existing economic theories of prosocial motives for contributing to real-world public goods. We use an online experiment coupled with observational data to elicit social preferences within a diverse sample of 850 Wikipedia contributors, and seek to use to those measures to predict subjects’ field contributions to the Wikipedia project. We find that subjects’ field contributions to Wikipedia are strongly related to their level of reciprocity in a conditional Public Goods game and in a Trust game and to their revealed preference for social image within the Wikipedia community, but not to their level of altruism either in a standard or in a directed Dictator game. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications, as we show that reciprocity and social image are both strong motives for sustaining cooperation in peer production environments, while altruism is not.

Where are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia

A comprehensive survey conducted in 2008 found that only 13 % of Wikipedia contributors are women. We proposed that masculine norms for behavior in Wikipedia, which may be further exacerbated by the disinhibiting nature of an online, anonymous environment, lead to different psychological experiences for women and men, which, in turn, explain gender differences in contribution behavior. We hypothesized that, among a sample of individuals who occasionally contribute to Wikipedia, women would report less confidence in their expertise, more discomfort with editing others’ work, and more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men, all of which are crucial aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. We also hypothesized that gender differences in these psychological experiences would explain women’s lower contribution rate compared to men in this sample. We analyzed data from a sample of 1,598 individuals in the United States who completed the English version of an international survey of Wikipedia users and readers conducted in 2008 and who reported being occasional contributors. Significant gender differences were found in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict) and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men. Mediation analyses revealed that confidence in expertise and discomfort with editing partially mediated the gender difference in number of articles edited, the standard measure for contribution to Wikipedia. Implications for the gender gap in Wikipedia and in organizations more generally are discussed.

Enrolled Since the Beginning: Assessing Wikipedia Contributors' Behavior by Their First Contribution

Enrolled Since the Beginning: Assessing Wikipedia Contributors' Behavior by Their First Contribution

Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia

Despite the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding online cultural production, profound gender inequalities remain in who contributes to one of the most visited Web sites worldwide, Wikipedia. In analyzing this persistent disparity, previous research has focused on aspects of current contributors and the existing Wikipedia community. We draw on unique panel survey data of young adults with information about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We examine the role of people's background attributes and Internet skills in participation on the site. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly significant Internet skills gap. Our results show that the most likely contributors are high-skilled males and that among low-skilled Internet users no gender gap in Wikipedia contributions exists. Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.