Assessing the accuracy and quality of Wikipedia entries…

Statut

Assessing the accuracy and quality of Wikipedia entries compared to popular online encyclopaedias :

“Previous studies, most notably the one carried out by the journal Nature in 2005, have sought to compare the quality of Wikipedia articles with that of similar articles in other online Encyclopaedias. In part as a result of the findings of such studies, Wikipedia has instigated a number of processes for assessing the quality of its entries, inviting readers and editors to rate articles according to criteria such as trustworthiness, neutrality, completeness and readability. Recently, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales highlighted the value of conducting a study which analysed articles across both languages and subjects to allow differences in levels of accuracy and quality across language and subject domains to be identified. The results could inform editor recruitment efforts and the design of expert feedback mechanisms.

The size, scope and complexity of undertaking such a large-scale study necessitated gathering preliminary evidence to inform the methodology and design. It was therefore decided that a small-scale preliminary project would be essential to determine a sound research methodology, which is the reason that the present pilot study was undertaken. The present study, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, presents the background, methodology, results and findings of a preliminary pilot conducted by Epic, a UK-based e-learning company, in partnership with the University of Oxford.”

URL : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf

Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia Wikipedia stands as…

Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia :

“Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3613/3117

Citations to Wikipedia in Chemistry Journals: A Preliminary Study

Wikipedia has been the subject of an increasing number of studies. Many of these have focused on the quality of Wikipedia articles and the use of Wikipedia by students. Little research has focused on the use of Wikipedia by scholars. This study helps to fill that gap by examining citations to Wikipedia in chemistry journals from three major publishers over a five year period.

The study reports the number of citations to Wikipedia and describes how Wikipedia is being cited. The results show that, while only a small percentage of all articles contained a citation to Wikipedia, it is in fact being cited as a credible information source in articles in major chemistry journals.

URL : http://www.istl.org/11-fall/refereed2.html

The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications …

The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications :

“Publications in the Institute of Scientific Information’s (ISI, currently Thomson Reuters) Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus databases were utilized to collect data about Wikipedia research and citations to Wikipedia. The growth of publications on Wikipedia research, the most active researchers, their associated institutions, academic fields and their geographic distribution are treated in this paper. The impact and influence of Wikipedia were identified, utilizing cited work found in (WoS) and Scopus. Additionally, leading authors, affiliated institutions, countries, academic fields, and publications that frequently cite Wikipedia are identified.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3492/3031

Cross‐cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community This…

Cross‐cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community :

“This paper reports a cross‐cultural analysis of four Wikipedias in different languages and demonstrates their roles as communities of practice (CoPs). Prior research on CoPs and on the Wikipedia community often lacks cross‐cultural analysis. Despite the fact that over 75% of Wikipedia is written in languages other than English, research on Wikipedia primarily focuses on the English Wikipedia and tends to overlook the Wikipedias in other languages. This paper first argues that Wikipedia communities can be analyzed and understood as CoPs. Second, norms of behaviors are examined in four Wikipedia languages (English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay), and the similarities and differences across these four languages are reported. Specifically, typical behaviors on three types of discussion spaces (Talk, User Talk, and Wikipedia Talk) are identified and examined across languages. Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural diversity as well as the size of the community, and the function of each discussion area provide lenses for understanding the similarities and differences. As such, this paper expands the research on online CoPs through an examination of cultural variations across multiple CoPs, and increases our understanding of Wikipedia communities in various languages.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15529

Beyond vandalism Wikipedia trolls Research on trolls…

Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls :

“Research on trolls is scarce, but their activities challenge online communities; one of the main challenges of the Wikipedia community is to fight against vandalism and trolls. This study identifies Wikipedia trolls’ behaviours and motivations, and compares and contrasts hackers with trolls; it extends our knowledge about this type of vandalism and concludes that Wikipedia trolls are one type of hacker. This study reports that boredom, attention seeking, and revenge motivate trolls; they regard Wikipedia as an entertainment venue, and find pleasure from causing damage to the community and other people. Findings also suggest that trolls’ behaviours are characterized as repetitive, intentional, and harmful actions that are undertaken in isolation and under hidden virtual identities, involving violations of Wikipedia policies, and consisting of destructive participation in the community.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15530

Open Licenses and Radical Shift in Digit…

Open Licenses and Radical Shift in Digital Content Distribution. :

“World Wide Web is becoming the most preferred location for academic community, librarians and other professionals for communication, content generation and transfer. They are extensively making use of web services such as blogs, podcast, wiki’s, digital libraries and institutional repositories for the transfer and access of information content in digital format. Text, images, audio and video in digitized format facilitate easy creation, transfer and duplication of information throughout networks. Reckless use and transfer of digital content through Internet invokes threats to copyright claims of commercial content creators. This situation force commercial publishers to make use of technology and law to ensure security and prevent unauthorized access of digital content.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19438/
https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/tag/wikipedia/page/7/
microblogging.infodocs.eu
CC-MAIN-2024-18
71209
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FVMNCKSQJCSVF2IV6WM7VWH6DHFPWWSE
<urn:uuid:ac15d95b-5f6f-45d1-8f7b-40c48560b8dd>
2024-04-18T14:45:42Z
83.166.141.150
text/html
sha1:3L4GMYHFJIDZ27SXEXGPLII2EVB3ALNN
<urn:uuid:a332a5e6-083f-4cef-96a8-d06c093adfed>
https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/tag/wikipedia/page/7/
response
<urn:uuid:4f0d8835-7b0d-462c-82bd-92c4eb07eee5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-116
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/