Hi everyone,

We sent a separate e-mail introducing our systematic literature review on 
Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in English.

We hope that our review would provide useful insights for the research 
community. Thus, we would like to ask your help in reviewing the research 
questions we have developed for the data extraction and synthesis phases of our 
review. Currently, we address the following review research questions:

1. What high-quality research has been conducted with Wikipedia as a major 
topic or data source? As mentioned in the introductory e-mail, we have already 
identified over 2,100 studies, though we will only analyze the journal articles 
and doctoral theses in detail. We will group the articles by field of study.

2. What research questions have been asked by various sources, both academic 
scholarly and practitioner? We want to know both the subjects that the existing 
research has covered, and also catalogue key questions that practitioners would 
like to be answered, whether or not academic research has broached these 
questions. Also, we categorize the research questions based on their purposes. 
We have more comments on this research question below.

3. What theoretical frameworks and reference theories have been used to study 
the topic? We are very interested in theory-driven research on Wikipedia, and 
would like to identify and categorize such work.

4. What research designs have been employed to answer research questions? By 
"research design", we include all that is commonly called research 
"methodologies" or "approaches".

5. What kinds of data have been collected for research purposes? Specifically, 
we note the data collection techniques, the time dimension (one-time snapshot 
or longitudinal observations over time), the unit of analysis, the technique 
used for extracting Wikipedia data (e.g. live Wikipedia or Wikipedia clone 
server), the Wikipedia page type, and the Wikipedia language.

6. What conclusions have been made from existing research? That is, what 
questions from RQ2 have been answered, and what are these answers?

7. What questions from RQ2 are left unanswered? (These present directions for 
future research.)


Do you have any comments or feedback on these questions? On one hand, we want 
to extract useful data from the studies that could be helpful to researchers. 
On the other hand, we have to be pragmatic, considering what we can cover when 
we're dealing with over 600 peer-reviewed studies.


Beyond these basic questions, we have a special note regarding our RQ2, on the 
research questions that have been asked. In addition to the research questions 
that we extract from the articles, we want to know what questions are of 
interest that have not been studied. For this, we have identified a few banks 
of Wikipedia-related research questions. Of note to academics and researchers 
is the collection at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Questions.
 Could you please review this list and update that page directly with any 
additional questions?  Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could 
update the list.

In addition, we are even more interested in questions that practitioners are 
asking, other than what researchers are asking. (Although we know that most 
Wikipedia researchers are also Wikipedia "practitioners", we define 
practitioner here as someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also 
a scholarly researcher.) Thus, we are sending a separate e-mail to wikipedia-l, 
foundation-l, and wikiEN-l asking them to update the list of Foundation 
research questions at 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals.

Thanks for your help.

Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
(http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content.html)
Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

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