[Air-l] wikipedia research?

[danah boyd]

Aaron Swartz is looking into what constitutes "the community" on  
Wikipedia through content analysis (challenging the fact that only  
500 people edit the majority of Wikipedia).

Andrea Forte (Georgia Tech) is doing a qualitative study of Wikipedia  
culture.

Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg (IBM) have been building  
visualizations of Wikipedia's editing patterns.

These are the key people that i know looking into Wikipedia from  
different angles.  Andrea's probably your best bet for looking at  
motivation.  That said, some very interesting bits are coming out of  
Aaron's work... namely that the kinds of edits made by anonymous  
folks are very different (and often content more detailed content)  
than those made from people with accounts who are frequent editors.

(Jimmy - do you know of other studies going on?)

danah


On Oct 7, 2006, at 2:23 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:

> Having had several experiences with Wikipedia entries and edits  
> this week,
> I am curious if anyone is doing research on:
>
> the social structure and reward structure of Wikipedists -- item  
> enterers,
> editing others, administrators, etc. (I don't know the structure well
> enough to know the nomenclature).
>
>  Barry Wellman
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>
>   Barry Wellman   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology   NetLab Director
>   Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
>   455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
>   wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
>         for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
>  _____________________________________________________________________
>
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"taken out of context i must seem so strange"

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