Wikipedia:What are these researchers doing in my Wikipedia?
Essay on editing Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Expanding articles is not the only way to contribute to Wikipedia. There is room for many different types of contribution: copy edits, content edits, template construction, vandal fighting, bot management, etc. Through the use of the scientific method, researchers contribute to Wikipedia by extended understanding about the community and bringing state-of-the-art technologies to editors.
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Who are they?
Researchers have been studying Wikipedia and Wikipedians as long as Wikipedia has been around. There are a wide variety of backgrounds from which people approach studying Wikipedia.
- Academics: the students, professors, and staff of colleges and universities
- Industry researchers: the staff of private sector companies and government
- Independents: individuals without an affiliation with an interest in studying Wikipedia
They are here to perform scientific analysis of Wikipedia and its users and, most often, intend to publish the results of their work in academic publications. Most self-identified researchers on Wikipedia are academics who are primarily interested in expanding knowledge.
What do they do?
In the past, research in Wikipedia has built an understanding of how Wikipedia works,[1] how editors interact with each other,[2] what contributions are discarded and why,[3] how admins are chosen,[4][5] and how to detect vandalism.[6][7] This research serves to increase understanding in how Wikipedia works and to improve its functioning. Researchers approach understanding Wikipedia in a few different ways.
- Field experiment: Determines the limitations and strengths of Wikipedia's functionality or tests new functionality for editing, collaborating, navigating, etc., by developing and distributing modifications to Wikipedia's functionality.
- Surveys and interviews: Learns various aspects of editors and editing (e.g. demographics, motivations, activities) using pre-written forms or back-and-forth conversations. Requests for participation can be either general (i.e. random), or targeted to specific editors. Requests for participation require sending unsolicited messages.
- Participant observation: Gains a close familiarity with the editing community by joining Wikipedia and doing the same work that Wikipedians do on a regular basis. They often casually converse with editors as a part of the collaborative editing process.
- Offline analysis: Analyzes database snapshots of publicly available information to examine the history of encyclopedia construction.
Why are they here?
Wikipedia is an interesting medium for scientific research. It is one of the most visited websites on the internet, serving as an information resource to millions of users every day.[8] Scientists find it remarkable that an encyclopedia in which articles can be edited by anyone anonymously, and in which damage can only be repaired after it occurs, has quality comparable to traditional encyclopedias.[9] They want to understand how the social dynamic of Wikipedia works. Further, Wikipedia is one of the few examples of millions of people working together on a single project. The Wikimedia Foundation also supports the work of researchers by maintaining a public mailing list devoted to scholarly research of Wikimedia projects, employing a research team, organizing and supporting the Wikimania conference for research of Wikimedia projects and releasing periodic database snapshots for analysis.
What contributions do they make?
Although researchers, as scientists, must strive to approach the subject of their research with neutrality, they end up being coincidental contributors to Wikipedia. Even when researchers who are interested in studying Wikipedia are not active contributors to articles, as long as their goal is to attain and share knowledge about Wikipedia, they are contributing to the project and the community. It is beneficial for a community to learn about itself and the more approaches to learning about a community, the better. Scientific research is one way for the Wikipedia community to learn about itself and thus, researchers benefit the community.
Although, as scientists, researchers' primary goal must be to extend knowledge—not improve the Wikipedia—improved understanding benefits Wikipedia and the community.