Submissions/The State of Wikimedia Scholarship 2013-2014

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2014.

This session will take place at 11:30am on Friday, August 8, in Auditorium 1.

Submission no. 6020

Title of the submission

The State of Wikimedia Scholarship 2013-2014

Slides

PDF Slides w/ Speaker Notes LaTeX Beamer source in Git

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

presentation

Author of the submission

Benjamin Mako Hill; co-presenters: Tilman Bayer, Aaron Shaw

E-mail address

makoatdot.cc / tbayerwikimedia.org / aaronshaw{{a}northwestern.org

Username

User:Benjamin Mako Hill / User:Tbayer (WMF) / User:Aaronshaw

Country of origin

United States

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

University of Washington / Wikimedia Foundation / Northwestern University

Personal homepage or blog

Homepage; Academic Homepage; Blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

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 birds-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 be presented at the conference, this talk will focus on the other important results that will not be presented at the conference. The work will involve collaboration with the team that produces the monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Detailed proposal: This talk is a regular talk given at Wikimania each year. Previous version were given at 2013, 2012, 2010 and 2009, for example.

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 be presented as part of the academic track, this talk will focus on the other important results that will not be presented at the conference. The work will involve collaboration with the team that produces the monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

A quick search of a multi-disciplinary scholarly database shows over 300 scholarly publications (i.e., articles, books, thesis, etc.) in the last year alone that contain the term "Wikipedia" in their title. Journals and conferences in the social sciences, computational sciences, humanities, engineering, and a variety of other fields have published scholarly works that examine Wikipedia, use data mined from Wikipedia, and try to help us make sense of Wikimedia projects, their people, processes, and artifacts. More than a dozen people have now graduated with PhDs earned by studying Wikipedia (and at least one by studying Wiktionary). There are even conferences — OpenSym (formerly WikiSym) most notable among them — that focus on wikis and who focus on publishing work based on Wikipedia. Even Wikimania has an academic track where scholars are presenting their own Wikimedia and Wikipedia research. 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. It will try to categorize, distill, and describe, from a bird's-eye view, the academic landscape as it is shaping up around our project. It will build both the experience of the facilitators, existing resources in our community (e.g., meta:Research:Newsletter, meta:Wiki Research Bibliography, w:Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies), and on research done for this presentation. It will quickly highlight a dozen or so of the most important articles published in the last year on Wikipedia, summarize their results, and describe what these findings might mean for Wikipedia, its editors, and processes.

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.

Track

Open Scholarship

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Absolutely!

Slides or further information (optional)

Slides: PDF of slides with notes; Git Repository with Beamer/LaTeX source code

Special requests

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

Johnbod (talk) 12:06, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:02, 31 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Pundit (talk) 16:50, 4 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:05, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
WiseWoman (talk) 06:11, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Masssly (talk) 14:38, 5 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Nicole Ebber (WMDE) (talk) 11:27, 3 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
JSahleen (WMF) (talk) 13:20, 5 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Saraanine (talk) 10:23, 8 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
--Another Believer (talk) 10:45, 8 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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