Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-01-27/Recent research

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From the Murić et al. "Collaboration Drives Individual Productivity" (or as above, "People tend to do more when collaborating with more people") paper: a "Project is either a repository on GitHub or a page on Wikipedia." So editors who edit pages edited by more editors tend to edit more pages. Perhaps causation flows from editing more pages to editing pages edited by more editors, instead of the other way around as stated in the third paragraph of the conclusion without any causal analysis in support. (I.e., individual productivity drives collaboration instead.) EllenCT (talk) 03:51, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good point, EllenCT. This is one of the reasons edit-a-thons have been so great. = paul2520 (talk) 20:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Paul2520: Yes that makes sense if the causation flows from collaboration to productivity as the authors state. But this is one of those frustrating papers that spends a lot of redundant effort demonstrating the correlation without analyzing the causation. It's so ripe for a senior or graduate level paper on causal research which is so often neglected. I'm going to show it to WT:WPSTATS and see if someone wants to try that. EllenCT (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That's a lot to digest! Bearian (talk) 14:32, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Many technical articles on Wikipedia have the problems identified in the Opportunistic Learning piece. Good general suggestions for improvements. I'm especially active in removing tangential information, fixing terminology issues and improving leads. ~Kvng (talk) 14:40, 2 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]