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

[Christine Moellenberndt]

<de-lurk = on>

I don't know of any off-hand, but there is a mailing list for folks who 
are doing research in and around the various Wikimedia projects you can 
join, and they may have some resources for you.  You can subscribe here:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l/

The list has both researchers and Wikimedia Foundation employees, and 
could probably provide you with some additional resources!

<de-lurk = off>

-Christine
Master's Candidate
San Jose State University


On 8/15/12 3:00 PM, air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org wrote:
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:38:53 -0700
> From: Monika Sengul-Jones <jones.monika at gmail.com>
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] Wikipedia article edit history extraction tools?
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAD_EfP+5jdaG8MDPfGMSwMO=vCifMU_bR8+7MPvDUF5Yb2AVyQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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
>
>
>