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Submissions/The State of Wikimedia Scholarship 2009-2010: WikiSym and Beyond

From Wikimania 2010 • Gdańsk, Poland • July 9-11, 2010


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Title of the submission
The State of Wikimedia Scholarship (2009-2010): WikiSym and Beyond
Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
presentation
Author of the submission
Benjamin Mako Hill and Felipe Ortega. Also with Mayo Fuster Morell and Jodi Schneider
E-mail address or username
User:Benjamin Mako Hill (mako@mit.edu), User:GlimmerPhoenix, w:User:Lilaroja (mayo.fuster @ eui.eu), en:User:Jodi.a.schneider
Country of origin
United States, Spanish, and Spanish State/Italy
Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and European Union Institute
Personal homepage or blog
Mako's Homepage (Mako); Felipe: Libresoft, University Rey Juan Carlos; Homepage (Mayo); Jodi's homepage
Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)
This talk is modeled after a similar presentation given at Wikimania 2009 in what we hope will become a Wikimania tradition.
This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research over the last year that has focused on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It will both give a birds-eye-view of Wikimedia research as a whole and go into depth on a dozen or so of the most important findings. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the Wikimedia Foundation, and our community as a whole, might be able to learn about ourselves. While wonderful research will be presented as part of the academic track, and while we hope that WikiSym will bring a larger proportion of Wikipedia and Wikimedia researchers to Wikimania this year, this talk will focus on the other important results that will not be presented at the conference.
In particular, Felipe Ortega will focus on the published results from WikiSym, held just days before the conference in Gdansk. Benjamin Mako Hill will look beyond the academic conference focused on Wikis to describe other important results from a variety of fields.
A quick search of a multi-disciplinary scholarly database over 300 scholarly publications (i.e., articles, books, thesis, etc.) in the last year alone that contain the term "Wikipedia" in their title. Journals and conferences in the social sciences, computational sciences, humanities, engineering, and a variety of other fields have published scholarly works that examine Wikipedia, use data mined from Wikipedia, and try to help us make sense of Wikimedia projects, their people, processes, and artifacts. A half dozen people have now graduated with PhDs earned by studying Wikipedia. There are even conferences --- WikiSym most notable among them --- that focus on wikis and who are heavily biased toward publishing work based on Wikipedia. Even Wikimania now has an academic track where scholars are presenting their own Wikimedia and Wikipedia research. What does all this work mean for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects? How can our community learn from academic research into our projects? Does any of this work have anything to teach us about how to run our projects? What does all that academic jargon mean in terms that any editor could understand?
This talk will try to point toward answers to these questions with a quick tour --- a literature review in the scholarly parlance --- of the last year's academic landscape around Wikimedia and its projects geared at non-academic editors and readers. It will try to categorize, distill, and describe, from a birds eye view, the academic landscape as it is shaping up around our project. It will build both the experience of the facilitators, existing resources in our community (e.g., meta:Wiki Research Bibliography and en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies), and on research done for this presentation. It will quickly highlight a dozen or so of the most important articles published in the last year on Wikipedia, summarize their results, and describe what these findings might mean for Wikipedia, its editors, and processes.
The talk will be given by two social scientists and academic studying Wikipedia and free culture and free software communities (e.g., he serves on the program committee for WikiSym) who are also Wikipedia editors. One presentor is also a and member of the Wikimedia advisory board. They will work to translate between his two communities. Collaboration on this presentation with others is welcome!
Wikimedia and its projects are and will remain, for some time, under academia's magnifying glass. This talk will give Wikimedians a view from the other side and help point at where we might go with some of the insight we gain in the process.
Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)
People and Community (?)
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Yes!
Slides or further information (optional)
Submissions/The State of Wikimedia Scholarship: 2009-2010/Notes


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. Aphaia 16:34, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. guillom 18:01, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Eloquence 02:24, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Jodi.a.schneider 02:53, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. El Ágora 04:48, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  6. WikedKentaur 19:08, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Gritzko 23:40, 24 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Kocio 12:48, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Shijualex
  10. Jérôme 15:01, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Ivanmartinez 15:32, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Laaknor 08:58, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  13. OsamaK 15:15, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Submissions/State of the art Wikipedia research

Attendees interested in merged proposal

  1. guillom 17:03, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Jodi.a.schneider 08:46, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Psychology 21:31, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Marinna 15:02, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Pietro Roveri 15:11, 13 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Jérôme 14:59, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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