User:BunbunYU/StudyingWikiCommons

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Wikimedia Commons (or Commons) has been an important part of Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) projects since it’s launch in 2004. It serves as a free online repository for WMF projects to store and manage diverse multimedia content. Commons, while a separate project, both benefits and contributes to other WMF projects. A majority of prior research has focused on Wikipedia, its organization, articles, editors, readers, and policies. Few studies have focused on the ways Commons benefits and supports activities in other WMF projects. Commons is a community with its own goals, participants and organization, so it is a worthy candidate for focused research rather than simply an adjunct of Wikipedia.

We are broadly interested in understanding the intersection between Wikimedia Commons and the needs and goals of other Wikimedia projects. We have four specific questions that we hope to answer through this research:

1. What are the goals of the Commons?
2. What are the goals of Commons curators (editors), and how do they participate to improve Commons?
3. How do the goals of Commons curators (editors) align with the needs and goals of other Wikimedia projects?
4. How do editors of other Wikimedia projects leverage the content of Commons to improve the quality of their projects?

Key Personnel

• Yihan Yu
• David W. McDonald

Methods

This is qualitative research.

Participants

We recognize that people come to Commons for a variety of reasons, at this time, we want to study the following two groups:

1. Commons Curators. Curators are editors who work extensively on Commons to upload, edit and organize contents. In this study, we will invite curators to talk about their experience with Commons. We plan to recruit 15-25 Commons curators for this study.
2. Wikipedia Editors. We want to interview editors who use multimedia content from Commons to illustrate their projects. We are interested in their needs for Commons, and how Commons can be improved to better support their work. We plan to recruit 15-25 Wikipedia editors for this study.

Recruitment

We will recruit participants through two channels, community board announcement, and individual, direct email invite. The community board announcement will target curators who have contributed to Commons and editors who have used multimedia content from Commons to illustrate at least one Wikipedia article in the last 24 months. After potential participants contact us to express their interest, we will screen their eligibility by examining their Wikipedia User Page, User Talk Page, and Wikipedia Edit History. We will identify individuals who we will contact directly by reviewing their publicly available edit history. We will review editors and curators editing history to make sure the participant meets our contribution threshold prior to individual contact. A member of our study team will send a personalized, direct email invite to editors who have inserted a picture from Commons to illustrate an article.

Data Collection

We plan to conduct semi-structured interviews with eligible Commons curators and Wikipedia editors who are 18 years old or older. We hope to record and transcribe the interviews for further analysis.

Wikimedia Policies, Ethics, and Human Subjects Protection

This work has been reviewed by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Washington. In late February 2020, the University of Washington Human Subjects Division (HSD) determined that this study is human subjects research and that it qualifies for exempt status. This exempt determination is valid for the duration of the study.

Under the IRB proposal we requested the ability to gain verbal consent from the interview participants. We will verbally inform individuals of the basics of the study, similar to the information provided in this research project description, and ask them whether they agree to participate, prior to asking any of our interview questions. During the interview individuals may decline to answer questions, or they can stop their participation and ask to have the interview deleted.

Benefits for the Wikimedia community

The primary impacts are a better understanding of Commons and the wikiwork that is performed by Commons curators (editors). We will also gain a better understanding of the relationship between Commons and other WMF projects (focused through the lens of EN Wikipedia).

There are possible indirect impacts through an understanding of potential improvements to tools and processes that would allow editors from other WMF projects to more effectively leverage the content in Commons.

Contacts

Yihan Yu, yyu2016@uw.edu