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Wikipedia:Don't bite the researchers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Please extend understanding to researchers of Wikipedia. Their work provides an invaluable resource to Wikipedia and the community. Research of Wikipedia increases knowledge about the encyclopedia's content, readers, editors, history, current state, and future and also yield important knowledge that is applicable to other open content communities. In addition to driving scholarly knowledge of such systems, this work often yields results that benefit Wikipedia directly. Because of the benefits that research of Wikipedia provides, the Wikimedia Foundation has a long history of supporting researchers and their work in the foundation's projects. But just like any other user of Wikipedia, researchers should be expected to not disrupt the editing process.

What is scholarly research?

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There is a distinction this essay must draw between academic/scholarly research and commercial research.

Scholarly research

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The primary goal of scholarly research is to expand human knowledge through the application of science. Academic researchers are primarily funded through grants from government agencies (NIH, NSF, etc.) and educational institutions (universities, colleges), but in rare cases, funding can come from the private sector. The intended product of scholarly research is to spread the knowledge they discover as widely as possible. In most cases, this happens through the publication of conference/journal papers, books, etc.

Commercial research

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The primary goal of commercial research is to increase a commercial, competitive advantage (e.g., market research). Commercial researchers are mostly funded by the private sector (the company they work for). The intended products of their work include improved decision making, invention, innovation, marketing, etc., and their results are seldom published externally or otherwise shared with a wider audience.

What does this mean for Wikipedia?

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While the primary motivation of commercial research is to obtain a competitive advantage and keep that advantage for themselves, the primary motivation of scholarly research is to obtain knowledge for the purpose of sharing this knowledge as widely as possible. Where a commercial researcher may study Wikipedia and its users with the intention of keeping the results of their work to themselves, a scholarly researcher will contribute their work back to the wider community that includes Wikipedia. For this reason, scholarly researchers of Wikipedia can be considered Wikipedians in the sense that the result of their efforts are beneficial to the community. In this essay, whenever the distinction is not specified, researchers and research will refer to scholarly researchers and their work.

Why are the researchers here?

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Wikipedia is an interesting medium for scientific research. It is one of the most visited websites on the internet, serving as an information resource to millions of users every day.[1] Scientists find it remarkable that an encyclopedia in which articles can be edited by anyone anonymously, and in which damage can only be repaired after it occurs, has quality comparable to traditional encyclopedias.[2] They want to understand how the social dynamic of Wikipedia works. Further, Wikipedia is one of the few examples of millions of people working together on a single project. The Wikimedia Foundation also supports the work of researchers by maintaining a public mailing list devoted to scholarly research of Wikimedia projects, employing a Research team, organizing and supporting the Wikimania conference for research of Wikimedia projects and releasing periodic database snapshots for analysis.

Researchers as coincidental Wikipedians

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Although researchers, as scientists, must strive to approach the subject of their research with neutrality, they end up being coincidental contributors to Wikipedia. Even when researchers who are interested in studying Wikipedia are not active contributors to articles, as long as their goal is to attain and share knowledge about Wikipedia, they are contributing to the project and the community. It is beneficial for a community to learn about itself and the more approaches to learning about a community, the better. Scientific research is one way for the Wikipedia community to learn about itself and thus, researchers benefit the community.

Although, as scientists, researchers' primary goal must be to extend knowledge--not improve Wikipedia--improved understanding should always benefit Wikipedia and the community long term.

The Wikimedia Foundation's support of research

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  • Database dumps: Wikipedia:Database download
  • View logs data feeds are available similar to the one aggregated by Wikishark.
  • The Wikimedia foundation has its own research goals that it encourages "reputable research organizations" to pursue
  • The Wiki-research-l mailing list for researchers to discuss research across Wikimedia projects.
  • The Chief Research coordinator "is a volunteer whose primary responsibility is to act as a first point of contact for anyone who is interested in analyzing Wikimedia's content, organization and community, and to pursue interesting research projects on their own."
  • Wikimania "is an opportunity for the communities involved in creating Wikimedia content to meet each other, exchange ideas, and report on research and projects, as well as a chance for them and the general public to meet and interact."

Examples of research and its benefit to Wikipedia

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Below are a few examples of research that directly benefits Wikipedia and its community. It is not complete. Rather, this list is given merely to demonstrate some types of research that have benefited Wikipedia. For a more complete list, see Wikipedia:Academic studies of Wikipedia.

Conferences that publish papers about Wikipedia

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ "694 Million People Currently Use the Internet Worldwide According To comScore Networks". comScore. 2006-05-04. Retrieved 2007-12-16. Wikipedia has emerged as a site that continues to increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S.
  2. ^ Giles, Jim (December 2005). "Internet encyclopedias go head to head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–901. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.