[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Research Showcase] April 17 at 11:30 AM PDT, 19:30 UTC

[Janna Layton]

Hello, everyone,

The next Research Showcase, “Group Membership and Contributions to Public
Information Goods: The Case of WikiProject” and “Thanks for Stopping By: A
Study of ‘Thanks’ Usage on Wikimedia,” will be live-streamed next
Wednesday, April 17, 2019, at 11:30 AM PDT/19:30 UTC.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmb5LoJzOoE

As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase

This month's presentations:



Group Membership and Contributions to Public Information Goods: The Case of
WikiProject

By Ark Fangzhou Zhang

Abstract:

We investigate the effects of group identity on contribution behavior on
the English Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia that gives free
access to the public. Using an instrumental variable approach that exploits
the variations in one’s exposure to WikiProject, we find that joining a
WikiProject has a significant impact on one’s level of contribution, with
an average increase of 79 revisions or 8,672 character per month. To
uncover the potential mechanism underlying the treatment effect, we use the
size of home page for WikiProject as a proxy for the number of
recommendations from a project. The results show that the users who join a
WikiProject with more recommendations significantly increase their
contribution to articles under the joined project, but not to articles
under other projects.



Thanks for Stopping By: A Study of ‘Thanks’ Usage on Wikimedia

By Swati Goel

Abstract:

The Thanks feature on Wikipedia, also known as "Thanks," is a tool with
which editors can quickly and easily send one other positive feedback. The
aim of this project is to better understand this feature: its scope, the
characteristics of a typical "Thanks" interaction, and the effects of
receiving a thank on individual editors. We study the motivational impacts
of "Thanks" because maintaining editor engagement is a central problem for
crowdsourced repositories of knowledge such as Wikimedia. Our main findings
are that most editors have not been exposed to the Thanks feature (meaning
they have never given nor received a thank), thanks are typically sent
upwards (from less experienced to more experienced editors), and receiving
a thank is correlated with having high levels of editor engagement. Though
the prevalence of "Thanks" usage varies by editor experience, the impact of
receiving a thank seems mostly consistent for all users. We empirically
demonstrate that receiving a thank has a strong positive effect on
short-term editor activity across the board and provide preliminary
evidence that thanks could compound to have long-term effects as well.


-- 
Janna Layton (she, her)
Administrative Assistant - Audiences & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation 
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[Wikimedia-l] Reminder: We are seeking a diverse group of volunteers to work with Foundation on movement communications

[Gregory Varnum]

Hello!

Do you or someone you know have some great communication skills or ideas to
offer the Wikimedia movement? If so, this might be an exciting opportunity
to engage with some high-level work for Wikimedia communications!

As we mentioned last month,[1] the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications
department is seeking 10-15 individuals to work with us over the next three
years to deepen our department's work with the community and increase
overall support for communications work across the movement.

If you are interested in joining the new 10-15 person Communications
committee, please send an email to gvar...@wikimedia.org by 17 April 2019
and include:

1. Acknowledgement that this is a three-year appointment and you are indeed
interested and able to serve.
2. Your community and staff (if you have any) usernames which you use on
Wikimedia projects. Also any information on other roles you may have within
the movement (please include both staff and volunteer roles). Please note
that you must be in good standing (ie. not blocked) on the wikis to
participate.
3. A brief statement on why you would like to serve on the Communications
committee, and in particular what you believe you can bring to the group
and what you hope to gain from the experience.
4. A brief statement on what ideas, if any, you have for what the new
Communications committee could do or how the Foundation could help support
its efforts.

If you are interested, but need a little more time to get your responses
together, no problem - just send me an email (gvar...@wikimedia.org) before
17 April 2019 so I know you are interested.

The inaugural committee will be selected by the Communications department
in the coming weeks.

We are hoping to find a diverse group of individuals from around the world
to bring their regional, cultural, and language expertise to our
communications work. Please share this invitation with others in your
Wikimedia networks and communities who you believe may be interested.

Thank you!
-greg

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Call_for_members_-_March_2019

-- 

Gregory Varnum (pronouns - he/his/him)

Communications Strategist

Wikimedia Foundation 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Reviewing our brand system for our 2030 goals

[Jane Darnell]

Thanks Andrew! Let me repeat here my vote for “Wikidata” as the brand name, too

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 10, 2019, at 9:05 PM, Andrew Lih  wrote:
> 
> I agree with Galder's and Camelia's thoughts and believe we should slow
> down to think about this issue as a whole. We cannot, and should not,
> consider this purely a "branding" exercise because the internal and
> external risks go well beyond this. We need to carefully take them into
> consideration.
> 
> At the Berlin Wikimedia Summit, I was asked by Zack McCune and Heather
> Walls about the branding issue. We talked about this at length so here is a
> summary of what I expressed to them:
> 
> - Outside view: I respect the work the comms/branding team has done, but
> let's remember that the recommendations are from an outside consultancy
> that focuses on only one dimension of this issue. Their work does not
> consider our internal community and movement dynamics as a whole. So the
> recommendation should be seen as just one data point.
> 
> - Unproven causality: While it's true that familiarity of the "Wikimedia"
> brand is low, the case has not been made that unifying our identity under
> "Wikipedia" is a solution for the particular markets in question. There are
> many other factors regarding adoption and recognition of any brand, not
> just Wikimedia, including the commercial context of mobile/Internet users
> and default consumer entry points to the information landscape (ie. search
> engine settings, starting home page, financial incentives and
> partnerships). Other factors are: first mover advantages (e.g. Korea, with
> Naver.com's dominance over Wikipedia), or government regulation (e.g.
> China, Turkey censorship) that affect any brand footprint. Remaking our
> whole identity for the possibility that we *might* get better recognition
> in certain markets needs much more careful study.
> 
> - That was then, this is now: If this was 10 years ago, I would
> enthusiastically embrace the idea of putting everything under the Wikipedia
> umbrella. In 2003, before the WMF had staff and resources, I was one of the
> primary volunteer contacts for almost all press inquiries about Wikipedia.
> I know the headaches of having to explain what "Wikimedia" is to
> journalists and the public. The book I wrote in 2009 was titled "The
> Wikipedia Revolution" for name recognition, even though I knew "Wikimedia"
> would be more accurate. But that was then. We are a whole lot more than
> Wikipedia today.
> 
> - We stand on three legs (and more): If there was ever a time that
> Wikimedia was more than Wikipedia, it is now. The trio of Wikipedia,
> Commons and Wikidata is the bedrock of open knowledge sharing in a way that
> was not true even 3 years ago. Wikimedia Commons is a community of its own
> with users of its content who never touch Wikipedia. See the many news
> outlets and publications that use now use CC licensed Commons images to use
> as visuals for their stories and products. Wikidata has quickly emerged as
> the de facto way for libraries, archives and museums to connect their
> metadata to each other. They are adopting it as their global crosswalk
> database that has been proven to be more scalable and highly available than
> anything in the information landscape. Wikidata is now regularly
> incorporated into conferences outside of our own Wikimedia community, and
> has the largest museum and library groups (Europeana, AAC, OCLC, IFLA-WLIC,
> et al) working with it.
> 
> Many times, I've had librarians and curators tell me the equivalent of: "I
> never engaged with Wikipedia, because 'article writing' is not what we do.
> But metadata and authority control records on Wikidata coincide with what I
> do every day." I just had a phone call with a prominent museum collections
> manager who said her goal was to eliminate their own local metadata
> vocabulary in favor of using all Wikidata Q numbers instead. We are
> reaching a new public with Commons and Wikidata that many Wikipedians, and
> WMF employees, may not be aware of.
> 
> - Wikipedia has a systemic bias: The biggest problem with Wikipedia is that
> you have to know how to read. This sounds ridiculously obvious but
> consider: in developing countries, we're often looking at a maximum 70%
> literacy rate. That's a big hurdle for our strategic goal of knowledge
> equity. We have yet to tap into video, multimedia, interactive and audio
> content as a major mode of knowledge sharing. What of oral histories or
> nontraditional/non-academic forms of human knowledge? The Wikipedia
> community has been neglectful or outright hostile to the addition and use
> of video and multimedia content in these areas. (I know this first-hand,
> having headed video initiatives or having students consistently reverted
> when adding multimedia.) Like it or not, there is an ingrained culture of
> text-heavy articles being the dominant mode for acceptable encyclopedic
> content which stands as a blocker for our