Mark Graham and I are co-chairs of the Wikipedia Track at next year's WikiSym
conference (now with added OpenSym!) and we're preparing the call for papers to
go out Friday week. There has been such great discussion on this list in the
past about what is currently missing from Wikipedia research that I thought I'd
send our draft to you in case there are items that you think we might add? Our
current suggestions below:
• What do particular articles or groups or articles tell us about the
norms, governance and architecture of Wikipedia and its impact on media,
politics and the social sphere? How is information on Wikipedia being shaped by
the materiality of Wikipedia infrastructure?
• What is the impact of all/some of Wikipedia’s 211 language editions
having on achieving the project’s goal to represent the “sum of all human
knowledge”? Do smaller language editions follow the same development path as
larger language editions? Can different representations in different languages
tell us anything about cultural, national or regional differences?
• What are the methodological challenges to studying Wikipedia? How are
researchers engaging with innovative methodologies to solve some of these
problems? How are other researchers using traditional or well-established
methods to study Wikipedia?
• How are wiki projects other than Wikipedia evolving? What are the
benefits to studying other wiki projects and can comparisons and
generalisations be made from our observations of these systems?
• How does information contained in Wikipedia shape our understanding
of broader social, economic, and political practices and processes? What
theoretical frameworks in social, economic, legal and other relevant
theoretical traditions can be applied to enrich the academic discourse on
Wikipedia?
Also really looking forward to some great papers next year. We think that it's
a really good thing that Wikipedia research has a separate track next year and
we're hoping that it's going to really strengthen the quality of research.
Looking forward to any suggestions you might have.
Best,
Heather.
Heather Ford
Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Programme
www.ethnographymatters.net
@hfordsa on Twitter
http://hblog.org
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
