Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-29/Recent research

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29 January 2014

Recent research

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By Aaron Halfaker, ...

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

In a new paper titled "Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms"^[1] published in Information, Communication & Society, Stuart Geiger (User:Staeiou) presents a critical reflection on the common view of online communities as sovereign platforms governed by code using Wikipedia as an example. He borrows the term "bespoke" to refer to code that affects the social dynamics of a community, but is designed and owned separately from the software platform (e.g. Wikipedia bots). Geiger mixes vignettes describing his personal experience running en:User:AfDStatBot with discussions of the related literature (including Lessig's famous "code is law") to advocate "examining online communities as both governed by stock and bespoke code, or else we will miss important characteristics of mediated interaction."

"Precise and Efficient Attribution of Authorship of Revisioned Content": Using a graph-theoretic approach, Flöck and Acosta investigate^[2] a new algorithm that can detect the author of a part of document that has been edited by many. They use a units-of-discourse model, to identify paragraph, sentences and words, and their connections. The authors claim that this approach can identify an author with 95% precision, which is more than the current state-of-the art. Most intriguing is that in order to make this comparison they have created the first "gold standard", a hand-made benchmark of 240 Wikipedia pages and their complex authorship histories.
"Which News Organizations Influence Wikipedia?": This is the question asked in a blog post^[3] by a post-doc research scholar at Columbia University's Tow Center for digital journalism. Looking at the top 10 news stories of 2013 - an admittedly subjective set determined by the author - the organizations from which the citations come are analyzed. Leading pack are the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN , but the author notes that the tail of the distribution is very long - 68% of citations are not produced by the top 10 organizations. Qualitative analysis discusses "the surprise for the news organizations that don’t make the top ten; CBS News, ABC News, FOX News [...] this top ten strikes as leaning left overall".

References

^ Geiger, R. Stuart. "Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms". Information, Communication & Society: 1–15. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.873069. ISSN 1369-118X. , author's copy at http://stuartgeiger.com/bespoke-code-ics.pdf
^ Fabian Flöck, Maribel Acosta: WikiWho: Precise and Efficient Attribution of Authorship of Revisioned Content. http://www.aifb.kit.edu/web/Inproceedings3398
^ Fergus Pitt: Which News Organizations Influence Wikipedia? January 17, 2014, http://towcenter.org/blog/which-news-organizations-influence-wikipedia/

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Lovely game instructions. Should be adapted into, I don't know, Wikipedia:Your first article and somewhere in Help or some such place. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:34, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
re: 80 percent of academics listed on the Wikipedia page American Sociologists are male, while in reality less than 60 percent of American sociologists are male. Did they count the %% for (fe)male sociologists in Encyclopedia Britannica? This phrase is constructed as if to uncover a male cabal in wikipedia. I would have believed in this if 80% of the wikipedians were our respected venerable academic sociologists themselves. But I am pretty much sure that an average wikipedian couldn't care less about a gender of a sociologist. In wikipedia our notability criteria is a major threshold. And if there is less women bios in wikipedia, this simply reflects the fact that our whole wide world wide web of academia gives less prominence to women academics, and that's it. Yes, wikipedia is a mirror of wikipedians' interests. Yes, pokemon and pornstars are better covered than sociologists of any gender or sexual orientation. But I don't believe in a sharp watershed of wikipedians' interests over "male vs. female sociologists". Staszek Lem (talk) 02:44, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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