[Air-L] Wikipedia article edit history extraction tools?

[Monika Sengul-Jones]

Hello Air-L list:

This summer I'm doing research on Wikipedia entries in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. A central question I'm asking is the extent to
which this field, as it is now on Wikipedia, includes/features/references
contributions made by women, feminist theorists, and feminist theory.

To answer this, I'm gathering data on existing pages using a variety of
mixed methods. I would like to ask for recommendations on tools for
extracting the history of editing on a page. I want to see how many times a
given article has been edited, by whom, and what types of edits and content
contributions are made over time. So far, I've found the "history" tool on
the Wikipedia page limited. I cannot see how many edits have been made on a
particular article and understanding what kinds of edits are made (e.g.
grammatical,  content) requires going into each historical page view. I'd
love to find a way to download the history of an article and extract the
data into a spreadsheet -- perhaps this is a tall order.

So far, I've found tools for extracting data on Wikipedia from the Digital
Methods Initiative website (which was first introduced to me by this list
serve! :)). Specifically, the program History Flow is useful to an extent
for visualizing types of content contributions and edits over time. But
there is no way to translate these visualizations into a spreadsheet format
-- as far as I can tell -- so I've been doing that manually, somehow
piecing together the history of edits on an article. Meanwhile, I was
recommended a tool called WikiChecker (
http://en.wikichecker.com/article/?a=science_studies) but the summary
format is limited and, at times, contradictory to data I get elsewhere.

If anyone has any other tools or methods to suggest for ways to collect
data on content contributions and edits on Wikipedia I would be most
grateful.

I'd also be happy to be in conversation with anymore interested in the
concept of the project. I'm working on it as a part of the FemTechNet
Initiative, spearheaded by Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz. I'm not sure
if information on the initiative has circulated here, so I'll paste in a
copy of the "call" which took place last spring. *
http://aljean.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/femtechnet-long-form-invite-may-2012.pdf
*

Thank you,
Monika

--
Monika Sengul-Jones
Graduate Student
Communication & Science Studies
University of California, San Diego
msengul at ucsd.edu