Why We Read Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, with millions of users relying on it to satisfy a broad range of information needs every day. Although it is crucial to understand what exactly these needs are in order to be able to meet them, little is currently known about why users visit Wikipedia. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap by combining a survey of Wikipedia readers with a log-based analysis of user activity. Based on an initial series of user surveys, we build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use cases along several dimensions, capturing users' motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. Then, we quantify the prevalence of these use cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on live Wikipedia with almost 30,000 responses. Our analyses highlight the variety of factors driving users to Wikipedia, such as current events, media coverage of a topic, personal curiosity, work or school assignments, or boredom. Finally, we match survey responses to the respondents' digital traces in Wikipedia's server logs, enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns associated with specific use cases. For instance, we observe long and fast-paced page sequences across topics for users who are bored or exploring randomly, whereas those using Wikipedia for work or school spend more time on individual articles focused on topics such as science. Our findings advance our understanding of reader motivations and behavior on Wikipedia and can have implications for developers aiming to improve Wikipedia's user experience, editors striving to cater to their readers' needs, third-party services (such as search engines) providing access to Wikipedia content, and researchers aiming to build tools such as recommendation engines.Comment: Published in WWW'17; v2 fixes caption of Table

Participations and Communications of Myanmar Academicians on Research Gate among Differences Disciplines

The purpose of this paper is to know the participating and communication of different disciplines among Myanmar academicians in ResearchGate (RG). The data were manually collected by visiting the profile pages of all members who had an account with the Institution of Myanmar in RG. In total, 1035 RG members and 59 participants' communications were analyzed by using the statistic method—Kruskal-Wallis H test under the five disciplines. The results show that Engineering and Technology disciplines massively participated than other disciplines on ResearchGate, while Natural science disciplines are more in research items. Life Science and Medicine disciplines have the most scholarly communication, respectively. There is no RG metric significant in social science disciplines. But, different disciplines of Myanmar academicians show varying levels of interest in being involved in RG with different significance Keywords: Researchgate, Myanmar academicians, Interaction, academic, social networks, question and answer site. DOI: 10.7176/IKM/11-2-03 Publication date:March 31st 202

Assessing Q&A Trends in Scholarly Communications: a Quantitative Study of ResearchGate

The purpose of the study is to explore and analyse the disciplinary question and answer (Q&A) trends prevailing in the scientific social network (SCN)/scientific collaborative network (SCN) also known as an academic social network (ASN), ResearchGate (RG) and to examine the subject wise status of Q&A, content sharing trends of Q & A on RG and statistical analysis of various tests. The present study adopted a quantitative research design (Correlational as well as explanatory) to pursue the research questions and objectives for conducting the study. The data was collected from the research gate (RG) platform and 35 subjects were selected from the subject area and seven different types of variables were selected from each subject i.e., Posts, Questions, Publications, Articles, Preprints, Conference paper, Literature review. Various tests viz, Descriptive statistics, t-test, normality test and correlation, JASP software were performed for analysis of the data. The findings of the study reveal Findings of the study reveals the subject-wise status in different variables such as Statistics has the maximum number (4575) and Genealogy has the minimum number of posts (48) and so on. On the basis of the total content of the subject areas, the Literature review is (1%) followed by Preprints (5%), Questions (6%), Conference paper (7%), Posts (16%), Articles (65%). Publications possess maximum value while measuring central tendency (mean & median) & dispersion (std. deviation & std. error) and those are the minimum in the case of Literature Review. Publications, Preprints & Conference paper shows normal distribution (p\u3e0.05) with low p-value, and the data-set for other four variables don’t possess a normal distribution (p\u3c0.05). The statistics of the Student\u27s t-test shows a maximum value in the case of ‘articles’ (viz. 50.19) and the ‘p’ value of all the variables taken to be \u3c0.001 except literature review (i.e., 0.005). Among the 21 correlation types, 7 possess negative correlation value suggests the presence of no correlation between those variables. Whereas, the other 14 possess a positive correlation value ranges from 0.013 to 0.906 depending upon respective p-values

Information exchange on an academic social networking site: A multidiscipline comparison on researchgate Q&A

The increasing popularity of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) requires studies on the usage of ASNSs among scholars and evaluations of the effectiveness of these ASNSs. However, it is unclear whether current ASNSs have fulfilled their design goal, as scholars' actual online interactions on these platforms remain unexplored. To fill the gap, this article presents a study based on data collected from ResearchGate. Adopting a mixed-method design by conducting qualitative content analysis and statistical analysis on 1,128 posts collected from ResearchGate Q&A, we examine how scholars exchange information and resources, and how their practices vary across three distinct disciplines: library and information services, history of art, and astrophysics. Our results show that the effect of a questioner's intention (i.e., seeking information or discussion) is greater than disciplinary factors in some circumstances. Across the three disciplines, responses to questions provide various resources, including experts' contact details, citations, links to Wikipedia, images, and so on. We further discuss several implications of the understanding of scholarly information exchange and the design of better academic social networking interfaces, which should stimulate scholarly interactions by minimizing confusion, improving the clarity of questions, and promoting scholarly content management

Aligning Community-Engaged Research to Context.

Community-engaged research is understood as existing on a continuum from less to more community engagement, defined by participation and decision-making authority. It has been widely assumed that more is better than less engagement. However, we argue that what makes for good community engagement is not simply the extent but the fit or alignment between the intended approach and the various contexts shaping the research projects. This article draws on case studies from three Community Engagement Cores (CECs) of NIEHS-funded Environmental Health Science Core Centers (Harvard University, UC Davis and University of Arizona,) to illustrate the ways in which community engagement approaches have been fit to different contexts and the successes and challenges experienced in each case. We analyze the processes through which the CECs work with researchers and community leaders to develop place-based community engagement approaches and find that different strategies are called for to fit distinct contexts. We find that alignment of the scale and scope of the environmental health issue and related research project, the capacities and resources of the researchers and community leaders, and the influences of the sociopolitical environment are critical for understanding and designing effective and equitable engagement approaches. These cases demonstrate that the types and degrees of alignment in community-engaged research projects are dynamic and evolve over time. Based on this analysis, we recommend that CBPR scholars and practitioners select a range of project planning and management techniques for designing and implementing their collaborative research approaches and both expect and allow for the dynamic and changing nature of alignment

Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies

Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development. Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability? This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres

Can Social News Websites Pay for Content and Curation? The SteemIt Cryptocurrency Model

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Information Science on 15/12/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551517748290 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.SteemIt is a Reddit-like social news site that pays members for posting and curating content. It uses micropayments backed by a tradeable currency, exploiting the Bitcoin cryptocurrency generation model to finance content provision in conjunction with advertising. If successful, this paradigm might change the way in which volunteer-based sites operate. This paper investigates 925,092 new members’ first posts for insights into what drives financial success in the site. Initial blog posts on average received $0.01, although the maximum accrued was$20,680.83. Longer, more sentiment-rich or more positive comments with personal information received the greatest financial reward in contrast to more informational or topical content. Thus, there is a clear financial value in starting with a friendly introduction rather than immediately attempting to provide useful content, despite the latter being the ultimate site goal. Follow-up posts also tended to be more successful when more personal, suggesting that interpersonal communication rather than quality content provision has driven the site so far. It remains to be seen whether the model of small typical rewards and the possibility that a post might generate substantially more are enough to incentivise long term participation or a greater focus on informational posts in the long term