The December 2016 Wikimedia Research Showcase:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2016English Wikipedia Quality Dynamics and the Case of WikiProject Women Scientists
By Aaron Halfaker
With every productive edit, Wikipedia is steadily progressing
towards higher and higher quality. In order to track quality
improvements, Wikipedians have developed an article quality assessment
rating scale that ranges from "Stub" at the bottom to "Featured
Articles" at the top. While this quality scale has the promise of giving
us insights into the dynamics of quality improvements in Wikipedia, it
is hard to use due to the sporadic nature of manual re-assessments. By
developing a highly accurate prediction model (based on work by
Warncke-Wang et al.), we've developed a method to assess an articles
quality at any point in history. Using this model, we explore general
trends in quality in Wikipedia and compare these trends to those of an
interesting cross-section: Articles tagged by WikiProject Women
Scientists. Results suggest that articles about women scientists were
lower quality than the rest of the wiki until mid-2013, after which a
dramatic shift occurred towards higher quality. This shift may correlate
with (and even be caused by) this WikiProjects initiatives.
Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration. A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians
By Andrea Forte
In a recent qualitative study to be published at CSCW 2017,
collaborators Rachel Greenstadt, Naz Andalibi, and I examined privacy
practices and concerns among contributors to open collaboration
projects. We collected interview data from people who use the anonymity
network Tor who also contribute to online projects and from Wikipedia
editors who are concerned about their privacy to better understand how
privacy concerns impact participation in open collaboration projects. We
found that risks perceived by contributors to open collaboration
projects include threats of surveillance, violence, harassment,
opportunity loss, reputation loss, and fear for loved ones. We explain
participants’ operational and technical strategies for mitigating these
risks and how these strategies affect their contributions. Finally, we
discuss chilling effects associated with privacy loss, the need for open
collaboration projects to go beyond attracting and educating
participants to consider their privacy, and some of the social and
technical approaches that could be explored to mitigate risk at a
project or community level.