2019:Research/State of Wikimedia Research 2018-2019

‎

Research/State of Wikimedia Research 2018-2019

Curie · Sunday 14:00 - 14:45

Presentation slides

Download here (pdf)

Abstract

This presentation is a regular talk given at Wikimania each year. Previous version were given in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010 and 2009.

This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects from the last year. It will give a bird's-eye view of Wikimedia research and go into depth on a dozen or so of the most important findings from the last year. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the foundation, and our community as a whole, might be able to learn about ourselves. While wonderful research will feature elsewhere in the program, this talk will focus on the other important results that will not be presented at Wikimania. The presentation will build on the speakers' work on the monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Hundreds of scholarly publications (i.e., articles, books, thesis, etc.) that contain the term "Wikipedia" in their title appear every year. What does all this work mean for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects? How can our community learn from academic research into our projects? Does any of this work have anything to teach us about how to run our projects? What does all that academic jargon mean in terms that any editor could understand?

This talk will try to point toward answers to these questions with a quick tour - a literature review in the scholarly parlance - of the last year's academic landscape around Wikimedia and its projects, geared at non-academic editors and readers.

Authors (quasi-alphabetical order)

Mohammed Sadat Abdulai
Reem Al-Kashif
Tilman Bayer
Matej Grochal
Miriam Redi
Aaron Shaw
Benjamin Mako Hill (honorary author emeritus)

Relevance to Wikimedia Community

Wikimedia and its projects are and will remain under academia's magnifying glass. This talk will give Wikimedians a view from the other side and help point at where we might go with some of the insight we gain in the process. For many years, academic research (e.g. about the gender gap and geographic imbalances on Wikipedia) has played an important role in to inform the community's work on bridging systemic bias and knowledge gaps, and was featured in several previous editions of this annual presentation. At the time of submission (June 2019), it can already be said that this has remained an active field in the 2018/19 year that is the scope of this submission. We will give it prominence in our process of selecting publications to cover.

Session type

40-min presentation.

Participants [subscribe here!]

# ...