In anticipation of the CPOV Amsterdam conference, in particular the Wiki Analytics session on Saturday March 27, the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) organized a workshop for Wikipedia researchers in town to present and discuss methods, tools and data among fellow Wikipedia researchers. What types of research can we do with Wikipedia with which tools and methods? Is there a need for a “comprehensive” list of tools that may be used for Wikipedia research besides the META page on Wikipedia and the tools on the toolserver.

Participants used two types of datasets:

• An existing dataset (public data that has been published by for example the Wikimedia Foundation)
• A self-compiled dataset (by scraping Wikipedia or by using existing tools built on Wikipedia to gather data)

Overall, visualization tools seemed to be an important way to visualize this data in order to gather insights. Victor visualized the growth from stubs to pages within Wikipedia, Erik/DMI visualized bot activity and edit history heating.

Types of research:
Erik Zachte: Analyzing Wikimedia statistics
Victor Grishchenko: Articles, how do they evolve?
Mayo Fuster: Governance by looking at the role of the platform provider
Johanna Niesyto: Translingual Space of Politics of Knowledge Production / comparative research across Wikipedias. Institutional side.
Erik Borra/DMI: The role of bots, article activity over time, controversy research by looking at where the editors are.

Methods
There was a mixing of methods, combining quantitative methods with qualitative methods. In an ideal world one would, for example, combine wikitrust with other methods. Mayo and Johanna noted that good research needs programmers combined with researchers as is the case in the Digital Methods Initiative (note from Erik: Unfortunately there is only one programmer within DMI). It is very important that these researchers and programmers can actually communicate with each other and “speak each other’s language.”

Methodological questions?
What constitutes an edit? What is a mature article? What are the indicators? Are they Wikipedia native?

Software and users
On top of Wikipedia articles, edits and user studies the platform itself was also an object of study. What is the role of the platform provider in governance? What are the rules, norms and guidelines implemented on Wikipedia?

Concluding remarks from participants:
Mayo: This workshop is very valuable because it is not common to find research spaces on Wikipedia. Especially research gatherings that specialize in methods. There is a lack of systemization in comparing methods.
Johanna: Great to have an exchange about methods that are open. PhD research is usually performed on a limited budget so the use of expensive tools is very limited. A great amount of tools used by the the participants are open-source or free to use.

There were six presentations that have been documented on the DMI wiki page:

1. Wikimedia in figures – Erik Zachte (Wikimedia)
2. Victor Grishchenko – Accretion and page growth
3. Mayo Fuster – Research Digital Commons Governance. Methodological design and lessons learned
4. Johanna Niesyto – Experiences with tools across the EN and DE language versions
5. Erik Borra – DMI’s Wikipedia tools

Erik Borra’s presentation of DMI’s Wikipedia tools that may be used to analyze an article’s network ecology, the places of edits and edit history analysis can be found below:

During the CPoV Wikipedia conference there was a lot of activity on Twitter on the backchannel #cpov. Fanatic tweeter and co-organizer Nishant Shah even got temporarily barred from Twitter due to “excessive tweeting.” API calls are the new scarcity online! Reaching the API limit often marks you as a spammer.

On top of that Twitter search is amnesic and the #cpov conference tweets will not be available anymore in two weeks. Fortunately Daniel Mietchen made a small movie from his favorite #cpov conference tweets. It’s wonderful to see how a Twitter backchannel could provide information for those not being able to attend the conference.

Summary of CPOV 2010 (March 26-27, Amsterdam) from Daniel Mietchen on Vimeo.

Wikipedia CPoV Conference

Geert Lovink

Patrick Lichty (USA)

Johanna Niesyto (DE) and Mayo Fuster Morell (IT)

Ramón Reichert (AU)

Stuart Geiger (USA)

Q&A

More Wikipedia CPoV Conference photos on Flickr.

Dan O’Sullivan (UK), author of Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice? gave a lecture on ‘An Encyclopedia for the Times: Thoughts on Wikipedia from a Historical Perspective’ at the Critical Point of View Wikipedia Conference in Amsterdam.

Dan O'Sullivan (UK)

Encyclopedias are conservative in nature because they only look back and conserve signifying moments in time. They digest what came of ancient learning: the Greek and Medieval time. The mirror is often used as a metaphor or trope to describe encyclopedias. However, the metaphor of the mirror implicates that the natural world (the human world) is static and that you can take a picture of it and put it in a book.

Can we have a radical encyclopedia? Yes, we can, when the times are right. Francis Bacon produced a trope of knowledge as a tree which was more radical than a mirror. A tree can grow and offspring can be produced. The encyclopedia is often seen as a standalone learning unit that serves as a personal university

Is Wikipedia a radical encyclopedia?
Of course it is:

• Digital in nature with 60 million hyperlinks. O’Sullivan introduces classic hypertext theory: The end of the author, Landow and the rhizome metaphor for hyperlinks. Landow called hyperlinks a cultural revolution
• Wikipedia/Wikimedia community
• It produces a new view of knowledge that is never changing, pluralistic, interlinked and certainly not static and fixed for all time.

In spite of all that Wikipedia is also conservative. Not in it’s talk pages (a radical feature) but how many people actually read those pages? The public face of Wikipedia is taken from 19th century multivolume encyclopedia. It is trying to be an encyclopedia in the traditional sense: universal, impartial account of the world. But just one single account of the world is rather conservative. It’s going back even before the Enlightenment.

What is wrong with Wikipedia?
The NPoV leads to a consensus that is very limiting because it doesn’t allow you to read different voices. Modern knowledge is diverse and changes all the time. Producing static articles is conservative. Proposal: no blend compromises by putting all the different voices in the same article,

Everything is radical about Wikipedia except for the actual articles.

More CPoV Wikipedia Conference reports at the CPoV blog.

Google Earth. De wereld als interface.

Writing a book online and facilitating a discussion around it seems to be very popular these days. McKenzie Wark is working on GAM3R 7H30RY which will be published by Harvard University Press in April 2007, and it will contain contributions from readers of his site. Readers are discussing and participating in the writing process and the networked book is born. The Institute for the Future of the Book is concerned with issues around “the book’s reinvention in a networked environment.”¹

Read More…

1. IFB [↩]