Wikipedia:Don't bite the researchers

Please extend understanding to researchers of Wikipedia. Their work provides an invaluable resource to Wikipedia and the community. Research of Wikipedia increases knowledge about the encyclopedia's content, readers, editors, history, current state, and future and also yield important knowledge that is applicable to other open content communities. In addition to driving scholarly knowledge of such systems, this work often yields results that benefit Wikipedia directly. Because of the benefits that research of Wikipedia provides, the Wikimedia Foundation has a long history of supporting researchers and their work in the foundation's projects. But just like any other user of Wikipedia, researchers should be expected to not disrupt the editing process.

What is scholarly research?

There is a distinction this essay must draw between academic/scholarly research and commercial research.

Scholarly research

The primary goal of scholarly research is to expand human knowledge through the application of science. Academic researchers are primarily funded through grants from government agencies (NIH, NSF, etc.) and educational institutions (universities, colleges), but in rare cases, funding can come from the private sector. The intended product of scholarly research is to spread the knowledge they discover as widely as possible. In most cases, this happens through the publication of conference/journal papers, books, etc.

Commercial research

The primary goal of commercial research is to increase a commercial, competitive advantage (e.g., market research). Commercial researchers are mostly funded by the private sector (the company they work for). The intended products of their work include improved decision making, invention, innovation, marketing, etc., and their results are seldom published externally or otherwise shared with a wider audience.

What does this mean for Wikipedia?

While the primary motivation of commercial research is to obtain a competitive advantage and keep that advantage for themselves, the primary motivation of scholarly research is to obtain knowledge for the purpose of sharing this knowledge as widely as possible. Where a commercial researcher may study Wikipedia and its users with the intention of keeping the results of their work to themselves, a scholarly researcher will contribute their work back to the wider community that includes Wikipedia. For this reason, scholarly researchers of Wikipedia can be considered Wikipedians in the sense that the result of their efforts are beneficial to the community. In this essay, whenever the distinction is not specified, researchers and research will refer to scholarly researchers and their work.

Why are the researchers here?

See also: Wikipedia:What are these researchers doing in my Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an interesting medium for scientific research. It is one of the most visited websites on the internet, serving as an information resource to millions of users every day. Scientists find it remarkable that an encyclopedia in which articles can be edited by anyone anonymously, and in which damage can only be repaired after it occurs, has quality comparable to traditional encyclopedias. They want to understand how the social dynamic of Wikipedia works. Further, Wikipedia is one of the few examples of millions of people working together on a single project. The Wikimedia Foundation also supports the work of researchers by maintaining a public mailing list devoted to scholarly research of Wikimedia projects, employing a Research team, organizing and supporting the Wikimania conference for research of Wikimedia projects and releasing periodic database snapshots for analysis.

Researchers as coincidental Wikipedians

Although researchers, as scientists, must strive to approach the subject of their research with neutrality, they end up being coincidental contributors to Wikipedia. Even when researchers who are interested in studying Wikipedia are not active contributors to articles, as long as their goal is to attain and share knowledge about Wikipedia, they are contributing to the project and the community. It is beneficial for a community to learn about itself and the more approaches to learning about a community, the better. Scientific research is one way for the Wikipedia community to learn about itself and thus, researchers benefit the community.

Although, as scientists, researchers' primary goal must be to extend knowledge--not improve Wikipedia--improved understanding should always benefit Wikipedia and the community long term.

The Wikimedia Foundation's support of research

• Database dumps: Wikipedia:Database download
• View logs data feeds are available similar to the one aggregated by Wikishark.
• The Wikimedia foundation has its own research goals that it encourages "reputable research organizations" to pursue
• The Wiki-research-l mailing list for researchers to discuss research across Wikimedia projects.
• The Chief Research coordinator "is a volunteer whose primary responsibility is to act as a first point of contact for anyone who is interested in analyzing Wikimedia's content, organization and community, and to pursue interesting research projects on their own."
• Wikimania "is an opportunity for the communities involved in creating Wikimedia content to meet each other, exchange ideas, and report on research and projects, as well as a chance for them and the general public to meet and interact."

Examples of research and its benefit to Wikipedia

Below are a few examples of research that directly benefits Wikipedia and its community. It is not complete. Rather, this list is given merely to demonstrate some types of research that have benefited Wikipedia. For a more complete list, see Wikipedia:Academic studies of Wikipedia.

• A content-driven reputation system for the Wikipedia by Adler et al., describes the framework of a system that uses the history of words and their authors to assign trust-ability ratings to content in Wikipedia. This work was a precursor to WikiTrust, a live implementation of trust-ability ratings in Wikipedia.
• The Singularity is not Near: The slowing growth of Wikipedia by Bongwon Suh et al., shows the decreasing rate of new editors that stick around in Wikipedia and proposes that this declining growth may not be bad. Instead it could be due to the fact that there just aren't as many new subjects notable enough to add to Wikipedia as there once were that this could be explained by a population growth model with available work (articles to write) as the resource to be consumed and editors as members of the population.
• Creating, Destroying and Restoring Value in Wikipedia by Priedhorsky et al. shows how extremely rare it is that any particular request for an article in Wikipedia will return a vandalized version (giving credibility to the encyclopedia). This paper also shows how the majority of value in Wikipedia is contributed by a few extremely active editors.
• Wikipedians are Born, not Made: A study of power editors in Wikipedia by Panciera et al. finds that it is not common for an editor to make more than a couple of edits before leaving Wikipedia, but discovers that, if an editor makes an edit between 24 and 48 hours after their first, they are very likely to become prolific Wikipedians.
• An Architecture to Support Intelligent User Interfaces for Wikis by Means of Natural Language Processing by Hoffart et al., describes and constructs a framework for incorporating state of the art natural language processing tools into Wikipedia.
• Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia. by Clauson et al. compared the accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference, a traditionally-edited resource. Wikipedia answered fewer questions and was less complete than Medscape, but no gross errors were found in Wikipedia and its content has improved over time.
• Editing Wikipedia content by screen reader: easier interaction with the Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite. by Buzzi et al. sought to improve Wikipedia usability for the blind and promote the application of standards relating to Web accessibility and usability by analysing the interface using the JAWS screen reader and a list of suggested improvements was recommended based on W3C and WAI standards. After making the improvements in a controlled environment, the study shows significant improvements in page overview, rapid navigation, and total control of what is happening in the interface.

Conferences that publish papers about Wikipedia

• Wikimania: run by Wikimedia. Publishes research about Wikimedia projects.
• OpenSym focuses on research of wiki-like systems. It publishes tens of research papers about Wikipedia every year.
• The Research Showcase is a monthly public lecture series organized by the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team which hosts recent research related to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• GROUP
• CHI
• CSCW

See also

• m:Research:FAQ