Hi all, Just a reminder for our upcoming Research Showcase.
On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 4:59 PM Janna Layton <jlay...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hello all, > > The July Research Showcase will take place on July 21, 16:30 UTC (9:30am > PT/ 12:30pm ET/ 18:30pm CEST). The theme is the effects of campaigns to > close content gaps on Wikipedia, and speakers will be Kai Zhu from McGill > University and Isabelle Langrock from the University of Pennsylvania. > > Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otN3H-hIImQ > > Talk 1 > Speaker: Kai Zhu (McGill University, Canada) > Title: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia > Abstract: Open collaboration platforms have fundamentally changed the way > that knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed. In these systems, > contributions arise organically with little to no central governance. > Although such decentralization provides many benefits, a lack of broad > oversight and coordination can leave questions of information poverty and > skewness to the mercy of the system’s natural dynamics. Unfortunately, we > still lack a basic understanding of the dynamics at play in these systems > and specifically, how contribution and attention interact and propagate > through information networks. We leverage a large-scale natural experiment > to study how exogenous content contributions to Wikipedia articles affect > the attention that they attract and how that attention spills over to other > articles in the network. Results reveal that exogenously added content > leads to significant, substantial, and long-term increases in both content > consumption and subsequent contributions. Furthermore, we find significant > attention spillover to downstream hyperlinked articles. Through both > analytical estimation and empirically informed simulation, we evaluate > policies to harness this attention contagion to address the problem of > information poverty and skewness. We find that harnessing attention > contagion can lead to as much as a twofold increase in the total attention > flow to clusters of disadvantaged articles. Our findings have important > policy implications for open collaboration platforms and information > networks. > > Talk 2 > Speaker: Isabelle Langrock (University of Pennsylvania, USA) > Title: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions > Abstract: Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its > biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of > knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents > are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and > enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements > intervene to try to close existing gaps? In this talk, we present a recent > study of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract digital > knowledge inequality. Our findings show that the interventions are > successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, > but they are less successful at addressing several structural biases that > limit the visibility of women within Wikipedia. We argue for more granular > and cumulative analysis of gender divides in collaborative environments and > identify key areas of support that can further aid the feminist movements > in closing Wikipedia’s gender gaps. > > -- > Janna Layton (she/her) > Administrative Associate - Product & Technology > Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> > -- Janna Layton (she/her) Administrative Associate - Product & Technology Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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