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

[Monika Sengul-Jones]

Hi Peter, hi all:

Thanks for the response. Indeed, I'm not looking to ascertain demographic
details of editors<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2174826/Does-Kate-Middletons-royal-wedding-gown-deserve-Wikipedia-page.html>,
that's not within the scope of the project. The bulk of what I'm doing is
content analysis of articles. A supplementary approach is to compare the
history of edits and contributions over time across articles. I've using
the history page on Wikipedia, IBM's History Flow, and WikiChecker for
this. I am looking to see if there are other tools for extracting
historical data on Wikipedia articles.

Thanks!

MSJ


On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Peter Timusk <ptimusk at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> Monika
>
> I am not sure how you will get the demography variables you obviously need.
> I use a handle to do my edits on Wikipedia. That's all you see in the edit
> history.  Of course some like me may have a male first name in this handle
> or a female first name. In my legal studies BA we learned that we had to
> cite the first names of scholars because this allowed us to see the gender.
> Wikipedia do not know my gender. Unlike some paid web site that may have my
> credit card data and access to my gender which they could in turn share
> with
> a researcher I don't think Wikipedia have much real data about me they can
> share.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Monika Sengul-Jones
> Sent: August-14-12 6:39 PM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] Wikipedia article edit history extraction tools?
>
> 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-20
> 12.pdf
> *
>
> Thank you,
> Monika
>
> --
> Monika Sengul-Jones
> Graduate Student
> Communication & Science Studies
> University of California, San Diego
> msengul at ucsd.edu
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of
> Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or
> unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>
>