Wikipedia Reading Group

Meetings: Intermittent Thursdays at 18:00 (6:00 PM) ET
Email list: email list
Location: Floating/TBD

Description

This group is a small, user-driven forum for discussing Wikipedia related topics. We will discuss recent research, current practice in different fields, engagement of universities in Wikipedia and other broad collaborations, and historical parallels in large-scale synthesis and sharing of knowledge. Participants are welcome to report on their own work and experiences and contribute to the reading list.

For each item we read as group, we'll also link to an summary page on Acawiki (a wiki for summaries of academic articles and books). Participants are each encouraged to contribute and collaborate on the AcaWiki summaries to help create resources for others reading or referring to these work in the future!

Participants

Fall 2011 Schedule

Do we want to meet this semester? If so, what is a good day? – SJ +

Spring 2011 Schedule

This semester we are moving to a Thur 18:00-19:00 (6-7PM) EST time; the Berkman Center main conference is not available then. So the meeting venue will be determined in advance of the meeting. Feel free to email Joseph Reagle if more information is needed.

Session 1: 02/9 17:30-18:30EST

Facilitator: Joseph Reagle

Location : Berkman

Pentzold, Christian (2010-12-06), "Imagining the Wikipedia community: what do community authors mean when they write about their "community"?", New-Media Society, retrieved 2011-01-06{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
de Vugt, Geertjan (2010), "Dare to edit! – the politics of Wikipedia" (PDF), theory & politics in organization, retrieved 2011-01-26{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
Gaio, Loris (2009), "Wikibugs: the practice of template messages in open content collections", peer production [1], retrieved 2011-01-26 {{citation}}: External link in |journal= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Session 2: 02/24 18:00-19:00EST

Facilitator: Joseph Reagle

Location: Shun-ling Chen's

Shun-ling Chen's working paper The Wikimedia Foundation and the Self-governing Wikipedia Community – A Dynamic Relationship under Constant Negotiation
Ashton, Daniel (2011-01-03), "Awarding the self in Wikipedia identity work and the disclosure of knowledge", First Monday, 16 (1), retrieved 2011-02-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Session 3: 03/17 18:00-19:00EST

Facilitator: Shun-ling Chen

Location: Shun-ling Chen's (RSVP to <schen at law dot harvard dot edu>)

Reagle, Joseph (2011-03-10), "Free as in Sexist?": The Gender Gap in the Free Culture Movement
Perovic, Sanja (March 2011), "The Intelligible as a New World? Wikipedia versus the Eighteenth-Century Encyclopédie", Paragraph vol.34, retrieved 2011-03-01{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Session 4: TBD 18:00-19:00EST

Session 5: TBD 18:00-19:00EST

Possible topics/readings

We want to define some topics and readings of interest. Please propose readings (and be willing to facilitate their discussion) or leave a note of '+1' or 'support' underneath others'.

Readings

Piskorski, Mikolaj; Gorbatai, Andreea (2011-02-11), "Testing Coleman's Social-Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia" (PDF), HBS WP No. 11-055, retrieved 2011-02-16{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Since Durkheim, sociologists have believed that dense network structures lead to fewer norm violations. Coleman (1990) proposed one mechanism generating this relationship and argued that dense networks provide an opportunity structure to reward those who punish norm violators, leading to more frequent punishment and in turn fewer norm violations. Despite ubiquitous scholarly references to Coleman's theory, little empirical work has directly tested it in large-scale natural settings with longitudinal data. We undertake such a test using records of norm violations during the editing process on Wikipedia, the largest user-generated on-line encyclopedia. These data allow us to track all three elements required to test Coleman's mechanism: norm violations, punishments for such violations and rewards for those who punish violations. The results are broadly consistent with Coleman's mechanism.

Mako's recent 1-day paper on gender and surveys

Topics

Communities and trust

Theses on WP communities - Viegas-Jesus?
WikiTrust analysis
Defining trusted knowledge: credentials (history of the law or medical degree?)

Wikipedia related practices

Education practices

Is there any way to share what we know with jargon used in papers such as this one?

(Old) Fall 2010 Schedule

Session 1: 10/06 17:45-19:00EST: Intro and "Useful Knowledge"

Facilitator: Joseph Reagle

In the first session we will discuss the group's plans for the rest of the semester and discuss a short but interesting readings by Hunter Rawlings and a research article by Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu.

Rawlings, Hunter (2007), Information, Knowledge, Authority, and Democracy (ARL Keynote (PDF), retrieved 17 April 2009 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (AcaWiki Summary)

Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Feng Zhu: Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia (Forthcoming in American Economic Review) (AcaWiki Summary)

Session 2: 10/20 17:45-19:00EST

Facilitator: Joseph Reagle

Sanger, Larry (2010), "Individual knowledge in the internet age", EDUCAUSE Review: 14–24 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (AcaWiki Summary)

Hara, Noriko; Shachaf, Pnina; Foon Hew, Khe (2010), "Cross-cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community", Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61 (10): 2097–2108 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (AcaWiki Summary)

What's mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring by J Thom-Santelli, DR Cosley, and G Gay. (Published in CHI 2009) (AcaWiki Summary)

Session 3: 11/03 17:45-19:00EST

Facilitator: Benjamin Mako Hill

This week we have three papers that are from the sort of social computing literature around CSCW, SIGCHI and the broader computer science based research community.

We've got two papers that are on the WP:RfA process:

Burke and Kraut, Mopping up: Modeling wikipedia promotion decisions
Jure Leskov, D. Huttenlocher and J. Kleinberg, Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process

Plus this third piece from CSCW last year:

Antin, J., and C. Cheshire. 2010. Readers are not Free-Riders: Reading as a Form of Participation on Wikipedia.

Session 4: 11/17 17:45-19:00EST

Facilitator: Ayelet Oz

Our reading for this week is available online only with a username and password. If you are planning on attending and do not have the username and password, please contact Mako (mako@atdot.cc) or any of the other participants for authentication information.

Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons, thesis by Mayo Fuster Morell.

Session 5: 12/01 18:00-19:00EST

[Please note we start a little bit later because of room availability.]

Facilitator: Joseph Reagle

Grimmelmann. 2010. The Internet is a Semicommons It is not only on Wikipedia, but it uses Wikipedia as a central example.
Geiger and Ribes. 2010. The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal

Session 6: 12/15 17:45-19:00EST

Facilitator: Joseph

Konieczny, Piotr (2010). "Adhocratic Governance in the Internet Age: A Case of Wikipedia". Journal of Information Technology & Politics. 7 (4): 263. doi:10.1080/19331681.2010.489408. ISSN 1933-1681. Retrieved 2010-12-13.
Oboler, Andre (2010). "The Framing of Political NGOs in Wikipedia through Criticism Elimination". Journal of Information Technology & Politics. 7 (4): 284. doi:10.1080/19331680903577822. ISSN 1933-1681. Retrieved 2010-12-13. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) (Preprint)
Sauper, Christina (2009). "Automatically generating Wikipedia articles: a structure-aware approach" (PDF). Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP: Volume 1 - Volume 1. Suntec, Singapore: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 208–216. ISBN 978-1-932432-45-9. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)