Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2016/12

December 2016

December 21, 2016 Video: YouTube

English Wikipedia Quality Dynamics and the Case of WikiProject Women Scientists

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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

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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.