Today we have announced at Libresoft, the research group in which I work at University Rey Juan Carlos, a new research project sponsored by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The goal of the project will be to study, from a quantitative point of view, the impact of the flagged revisions extension on the editorial activity of the German Wikipedia. We will focus on the effect of this new tool to reduce the vandalism from anonymous users, while measuring possible influence on other key aspects like the trends of contributions from anonymous editors or the number of new registered contributors.
Wikipedia Logo
I’d like to say thank you to Wikimedia Deutschland for this opportunity. Hopefully, this will be just a starting point for more interesting projects about Wikipedia and massive on-line communities at Libresoft.
We expect to publish the results before Wikimania 2010, so that we can present a brief summary there of our findings to all Wikipedians and attendees in the conference. So… stay tunned!!
For more information, read the official announcement at Libresoft website.
As a resarcher focused on quantitative anlyses of on-line communities, I need to keep up-to-date on the field. I have to read papers and articles, written by other colleagues and scholars on related topics. I must search for new methods and algorithms to cut out execution times, and finish before the next deadline. I have to evaluate new tools that let me create new graphs or compute new analyses. And I have to review many papers in different conferences, presenting results in this area. In this context, I’m still surprised by finding the same problem, over and over again.
When I started to study Wikipedia, 4 years ago, I was puzzled by the lack of reproducibility in most (but not all) of the papers and analyses I could find at that time. No source code available. Few implementation details. Little discussion on how to set up a similar environment and replicate the analysis. If you were lucky, you could access some evaluation version of a new cool tool, just to discover that it was deadly limited. Forget about the code. Try and do it yourself, if you can. That’s why, since the very beginning, one of the main goals of my PhD. was to publish an alternative, open source software tool to analyze any language version of Wikipedia. Read more…
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