With contributions by: Boghog, Jodi.a.schneider, Drdee, DarTar, Phoebe and Tbayer

Contents 1 Wiki research beyond the English Wikipedia at WikiSym 2 Quality of drug information in Wikipedia 3 Predicting editor survival: The winners of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge 4 What it takes to become an admin: Insights from the Polish Wikipedia 5 High search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles found to be justified by quality 6 Attempts to predict the outcome of AfD discussions from an article’s edit history 7 In brief 8 References

Wiki research beyond the English Wikipedia at WikiSym

WikiSym 2011, the “7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration”, took place from October 3-5 at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley (Mountain View, California). Although the conference’s scope has broadened to include the study of open online collaborations that are not wiki-based, Wikipedia-related research still took up a large part of the schedule. Several of the conference papers have already been reviewed in the September and August issues of this research overview, and the rest of the proceedings have since become available online.

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In July, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) and the Wikimedia Foundation launched WikiViz 2011, a data challenge calling for submissions to visualize the impact of Wikipedia beyond the scope of its own community, using open data. At this week’s annual WikiSym conference in Mountain View, California, the author of the winning entry, Jen Lowe (Datatelling.com), presented her work, titled “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us – Wikipedia’s Global Reach”. Drawing on open data published by the Wikimedia Foundation and the World Bank, she designed an interactive visualization that allows users to explore the readership of different Wikipedia language versions by country, and to compare countries with high or low levels of internet access. The following is an excerpt from Jen’s talk at the WikiViz awarding ceremony.

Visualizing Emptiness: Reflections on a Preoccupation with Missing Values

The first question to be answered for any visualization is always: what data to use? I spent a lot of time looking for outward-facing data about Wikipedia. When I finally found data about Wikipedia traffic by country, I knew I had the connections I needed between the world and the world of Wikipedia.

I cleaned data with R and visualized it with Processing, both open source tools. The top represents countries, colored by region and more broadly by global north (blue) and south (red). The bottom represents languages. Connections represent over 100,000 page requests in the year from April 2010 to March 2011. It’s interactive, countries and regions can be highlighted, and sorted by population, pageviews, pageviews per person, and internet access. All data is transparently available on rollover.

Missing Values

I think that visualization is amazing for its ability to force us to see what’s missing; to see the missing values in a collection of data. Anyone who has experience with data analysis, especially with analyzing other people’s data, knows the feeling of being totally preoccupied with missing values: how are they represented in the dataset? How should we deal with them – bootstrap to fill them in, or throw out the associated data completely? I find that visualization trains my mind to notice what’s missing.

Missed Connections in the Global South

When I sort by region, I can force you to see the emptiness, the missed connections in the global south. The more I do visualization work, the more I notice who’s missing, not just globally, but personally.

Conclusions

There are people in the empty spaces of the visualization who want to be Wikipedia editors, who want to contribute, but don’t know it exists, or don’t see a way in. Openness is easy – you can just attach a license and say something is open. Accessibility is hard – it requires someone to take responsibility, to commit sustained effort. So – the goal I propose is: we meet back in 10 years and see the circle FILLED. No more missing values, no more missed connections, no more empty spaces. With the quantity of Wikipedia data being collected, we will be able to see, rather than speculate on, exactly how a diversity of voices has changed patterns of edits, the content, and the connections of Wikipedia. We will all have a Wikipedia for everyone, that reflects the collaborative contributions of everyone.

Quotes from the jury

Erik Zachte, data analyst for WMF, says:

I find this visualization extremely elegant, even mesmerizing. It is a joy to play with the different options, and to watch how the screen responds. Part of its appeal is its complexity: It resonates with how many people see Wikipedia – colossal and manifold, it is not so easy to grasp its inner workings. Coupled with the orderly presentation, this complexity invites the user to dive in, and perhaps be the first to find some new treasure, some hidden pattern

Moritz Stefaner, information visualizer, commented:

The visualization is very rich in data and navigation modes. I much applaud the audacity to include this much data, navigation modes, and detail information, this has certainly been a great effort. The amount and density of the data is staggering.

“A Thousand Fibers Connect Us” is released under a Creative Commons BY-SA license and the underlying code will be published under an open license shortly.

Tilman Bayer, WMF Movement Communications

Dario Taraborelli, WMF Senior Research Analyst and WikiViz co-chair.

With contributions by: Tbayer, Daniel Mietchen, DarTar and Jodi.a.schneider

Contents 1 What the most active female editors contribute 2 Effects of reverts on wiki work 3 Further Wikipedia coverage at WikiSym 2011: Social dynamics and global reach 4 Link spam research with controversial genesis but useful results 5 How social ties influence admin votes 6 Wikipedians’ weekends in international comparison 7 In brief 8 References

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Gdańsk, Poland is currently filled with several hundred wiki enthusiasts, as the city plays host to two of the major wiki-focused global conferences this week: Wikimania, the official conference of Wikimedians and the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, and WikiSym 2010, the 6th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. This is the first time that both conferences have been coordinated to take place at the same time and in the same city.

Wikimania 2010

Wikimania 2010 is the 6th annual international conference for Wikimedia’s volunteers, collaborators, and stakeholders – focusing on discussion about Wikimedia’s projects and the core, free operating software, MediaWiki.  The conference starts Friday, July 9 and runs for three days into Sunday, July 11.   Over 300 participants from around the world are expected to attend and deliver over 50 presentations on topics within three conference tracks (knowledge, infrastructure, and people) that include subjects like offline viewing of Wikipedia, semantic MediaWiki, increasing participation on projects, and expanding Wikimedia’s global volunteer network.

Wikimania 2010 will also include for the first time an orchestral recital of the work of Władysław Szpilman, as a memorial on the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death in July, 2000.  Szpilman, a world-renown composer and performer, authored the memoir, The Pianist, which inspired the film directed by Roman Polański. This year will also include the first film premiere at Wikimania, the debut public screening of Truth In Numbers, The Wikipedia Story, a documentary film three years in the making by filmmakers Nic Hill and Scott Glosserman.

Also for the first time this year, Wikimedians converged in London, and throughout Europe, for wiki-train: a coordinated, rolling-wiki meetup on rails that brought a few dozens wikimedians together to ride from London to Gdansk. A highlight video reel is available on Wikimedia Commons.

Wikisym 2010

The sixth annual conference of Wikisym, is the gathering of academics from around the world focusing on wikis and digital collaboration systems, which now include over 300 different formats of wikis and online collaboration tools.  This year’s program includes dozens of open-topics, as well as two keynotes by Wikipedian and author Andrew Lih, and Cliff Lampe, Assistant Professor in telecommunications, media and information studies from the University of Michigan. Wikisym takes place July 7 through July 9.

Host city: Gdańsk

Gdańsk, the 1000-year old port city in Northern Poland has deep historical and multicultural roots.  The birthplace of Poland’s Solidarity movement and the first city to experience World War II, Gdańsk and the tri-city region are home to over 800,000 residents.  The area is one of the major industrial and cultural centers of Poland.  It’s a musical capital (home of the Chopin music festival), and a historic center for commercial trade throughout eastern Europe.  The complex history of Gdańsk is described in great detail on its English Wikipedia article, including the unique debate about the accurate use of the city’s name (Gdańsk or Danzig?), through history.

The local coordination teams for Wikimania and Wikisym deserve our great thanks for producing two conferences that bring together 100s of passionate wiki enthusiasts from all over the world.  Congratulations, and good luck!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

WikiSym 2009 has pushed back the deadline on their call for papers by a few more days — get your paper or workshop submissions in by April 2!

This year’s WikiSym will be in Orlando, Florida in October. WikiSym usually has a slightly more ‘academic’ feel than Wikimania, which tends to be more community-oriented (and of course more Wikimedia-specific), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the ones I’ve been to (San Diego 2005 and Odense 2006).

Of course, the Wikimania 2009 deadlines are also coming up! Workshops and presentations are due April 15… just like my taxes. :P