The ethno-wiki project: ethnographic museums in Wikimedia commons

The ethno-wiki project is an initiative to use Wikimedia as a tool to save vulnerable heritage collections of non-western cultures and revive the research on ethnographic artefacts. The project may be able to create a network of small ethnographic collections in different parts of the world, which despite having no money to spend on object databases, still want to become a part of the digital community in order to be less unknown; a network which might also include source communities of ethnographic artefacts in European collections. The idea behind the project is that information should be given in the language(s) of the country of the museum or collection, in English and –if possible- in the language of the ethnographic group that made the objects. The aim to translate information into the native language will enable the descendants of the makers of ethnographical objects to comment on the given information. In this way, people will be able to add that information that they find is important. As their way of looking at things is different than that of western researches and/or admirers of ethnographic artefacts, a discussion will take place between these two groups. What Westerners call an “ethnographical object” is often “an ancestor” in indigenous terms. This exchange of knowledge certainly will contribute to strength of this wikimedia project and will give way to new research. Also this wikimedia project allows for the creation of ‘virtual museums’ within Wikimedia enabling objects disseminated in numerous museums in different continents to be brought togheter. The initiative plans to include objects of ethnographic museums in Wikimedia Commons aiming at the reduction of irreversible loss of cultural diversity. The systematic integration of objects, in particular 'hidden' objects in the reserves of scattered museums, facilitates scientific research on the ethnographic past and the material expression of cultural traditions

MoodBar: Increasing new user retention in Wikipedia through lightweight socialization

Socialization in online communities allows existing members to welcome and recruit newcomers, introduce them to community norms and practices, and sustain their early participation. However, socializing newcomers does not come for free: in large communities, socialization can result in a significant workload for mentors and is hard to scale. In this study we present results from an experiment that measured the effect of a lightweight socialization tool on the activity and retention of newly registered users attempting to edit for the first time Wikipedia. Wikipedia is struggling with the retention of newcomers and our results indicate that a mechanism to elicit lightweight feedback and to provide early mentoring to newcomers improves their chances of becoming long-term contributors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for presentation at CSCW'1

Temporal characterization of the requests to Wikipedia

This paper presents an empirical study about the temporal patterns characterizing the requests submitted by users to Wikipedia. The study is based on the analysis of the log lines registered by the Wikimedia Foundation Squid servers after having sent the appropriate content in response to users' requests. The analysis has been conducted regarding the ten most visited editions of Wikipedia and has involved more than 14,000 million log lines corresponding to the traffic of the entire year 2009. The conducted methodology has mainly consisted in the parsing and filtering of users' requests according to the study directives. As a result, relevant information fields have been finally stored in a database for persistence and further characterization. In this way, we, first, assessed, whether the traffic to Wikipedia could serve as a reliable estimator of the overall traffic to all the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Our subsequent analysis of the temporal evolutions corresponding to the different types of requests to Wikipedia revealed interesting differences and similarities among them that can be related to the users' attention to the Encyclopedia. In addition, we have performed separated characterizations of each Wikipedia edition to compare their respective evolutions over time

Les institutions culturelles en coopération avec les communautés en ligne. L’exemple du Wikipédien en résidence

Le web social permet de nouvelles interactions avec les usagers des institutions culturelles dont le recours à des communautés en ligne (Flickr, Wikimedia) afin de promouvoir et enrichir leurs collections. La coopération avec ces communautés ainsi que l'engagement de certaines d'entre elles envers des institutions culturelles nous amènent à reconsidérer l'usage du terme générique "crowdsourcing" utilisé pour décrire ce phénomène. Basé sur une enquête internationale, cette étude s'intéresse au cas particulier du Wikipédien en résidence (WiR) qui officie en tant que représentant et conseiller de Wikimédia au sein de l'institution culturelle. S'ils sont expérimentés dans le monde Wikimedia, une grande majorité des WiRs ne viennent pas du milieu des institutions culturelles. Diverses, les activités qu'ils mènent sont orientées à la fois sur l'amélioration de la qualité des projets Wikimedia, sur la promotion des collections de l'institution culturelle et sur la formation des professsionnels de l'information. Ce travail s'arrête également sur les buts, les points de convergence et les obstacles à une collaboration entre les institutions culturelles et Wikimedia qui partagent l'idéal de transmettre librement et sans discrimination des informations au plus grand nombre de personnes. En outre, l'étude montre que la grande majorité des institutions culturelles ayant recruté un WiR continue à collaborer avec Wikimedia et a acquis une indépendance dans la participation à certains projets

The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit: the shifting values of Wikipedia editors

Wikipedia is often held up as an example of the potential of the internet to foster open, free and non-commercial collaboration. However such discourses often conflate these values without recognising how they play out in reality in a peer-production community. As Wikipedia is evolving, it is an ideal time to examine these discourses and the tensions that exist between its initial ideals and the reality of commercial activity in the encyclopaedia. Through an analysis of three failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia, this paper highlights the shift in values from the early editorial community that forked encyclopaedic content over the threat of commercialisation, to one that today values the freedom that allows anyone to edit the encyclopaedia

"Enlisting 'Vertues Noble & Excelent': Behavior, Credit, and Knowledge Organization in the Social Edition"

A part of the special issue of DHQ on feminisms and digital humanities, this paper takes as its starting place Greg Crane’s exhortation that there is a "need to shift from lone editorials and monumental editions to editors ... who coordinate contributions from many sources and oversee living editions." In response to Crane, the exploration of the "living edition" detailed here examines the process of creating a publicly editable edition and considers what that edition, the process by which it was built, and the platform in which it was produced means for editions that support and promote gender equity. Drawing on the scholarship about the culture of the Wikimedia suite of projects, and the gendered trolling experienced by members of our team in the production of the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript in Wikibooks, and interviews with our advisory group, we argue that while the Wikimedia projects are often openly hostile online spaces, the Wikimedia suite of projects are so important to the contemporary circulation of knowledge, that the key is to encourage gender equity in social behavior, credit sharing, and knowledge organization in Wikimedia, rather than abandon it for a more controlled collaborative environment for edition production and dissemination