A recent contribution to a booming business, the study of Wikipedia, is announced in the following item, taken from News.com and shared by VKS colleague Charles van den Heuvel:
Wikipedia planning to survey its members to figure out why they post
Posted by Josh Lowensohn
In the next several months Wikipedians, or the authors of the content found on Wikipedia will be the subject of a worldwide survey to find out about people's posting habits on the immensely popular online encyclopedia.
The Wikimedia foundation, which operates Wikipedia is employing Netherlands-based UNU-MERIT
to conduct the research that aims to figure out not only who Wikipedians are, but how much they're contributing to the site. The survey is also designed to find out why people are coming to Wikipedia, and the identify the types of users who go from casual browsers to site contributors.
[more here]
Earlier today Katie Borner, speaking at the
Virtual Knowledge Studio, discussed several visualizations extracted from other Wikipedia-oriented studies, all of which reflect the kind of imagery possible in studies of an object as dynamic as Wikipedia. Many of these slides and references to the studies can be found at the project site
Places & Spaces, which is rich in the use of visualization in a scholarly setting. Three Wikipedia-related studies are:
- History Flow Visualization of the Wikipedia Entry on 'Evolution' by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas (2006), reflelcting the edit history of a term in the encyclopedia;
- Emergent Mosaic of Wikipedian Activity by Herr, Holloway and Borner (2007), illustrating the flow of Wikipedia activity across time.
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