Research:GCI Wiki Study
Google Code-in is an annual programming competition hosted by Google that allows pre-university students to complete tasks specified by various, partnering open-source organizations. Among the proposed tasks by Wikimedia mentors, there is some about build statistics, in which students have to write SQL queries in order to get the answer to a given simple problem.
GCI Wiki Study is a small scientific statistical study on various wiki data in the context of this contest. It is therefore not a formal study but a pretext for training in programming.
Methods
editThe students are under 18 years old and for many of them are new to the field of computer science. The goal is to show them what can be obtained from such a database, while making them manipulate SQL.
Many independent problems to be solved are proposed to participants, that cover a great diversity of can be obtained from Wikimedia public databases. The instructions provided request to use public Wikimedia replicas DBS using Quarry interface, then to perform a quick visual formatting followed by a short analysis of the results.