TL;DR wall of text amirite? On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Chitu Okoli <[email protected]>wrote:
> [Apologies for cross-posting; this same e-mail is being sent to > wikipedia-l, WikiEN-l and foundation-l] > > Hi everyone, > > We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on > Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English > language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages, we > unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at > any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about Wikipedia > only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do include > studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are > published in English.) We have completed a search using many major databases > of scholarly research. We've posted separate messages to wiki-research-l > related to this literature review. > > We have identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have "wikipedia", > "wikipedian", or "wikipedians" in their title, abstract or keywords. As this > number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we > have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and > doctoral theses; we identified 638 such studies. In addition, we identified > around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles. > > We hope that our review would provide useful insights for both wikipedians > and researchers. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are also > wikipedians, we define wikipedian or "Wikipedia practitioner" here as > someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly > researcher.) In particular, here is a list of some of the research questions > we are investigating in our review that are particularly pertinent to > wikipedians (you can check wiki-research-l for the full set of 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 638 of > them in depth. 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. > > 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.) > > > Regarding our RQ2, on the research questions that have been asked, we want > to identify not only the research questions that we extract from the > articles, but also what questions are of interest that have not been > studied. For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related > research questions. > > We are most of all interested in questions that wikipedians are asking, > other than what researchers are asking. There is an old list of research > questions or goals at > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals; these > questions are about Wikimedia Foundation projects in general, though > Wikipedia is of course included. 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. > > Another bank of questions we have identified is more directed towards > academics and researchers: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Questions. > We have asked the wiki-research-l subscribers to update that list. We will > draw from both lists for our bank of research questions. > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Wikipedia-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l > _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
