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Wikimedia Research Newsletter

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The inaugural edition of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, published on July 25, 2011.

The Wikimedia Research Newsletter (WRN) covers research of relevance to the Wikimedia community. It has been appearing generally monthly since 2011, and features both academic research publications and internal research done at the Wikimedia Foundation. It is published as a section of The Signpost (titled "Recent research") and as a stand-alone article on Meta-Wiki.

Team

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The newsletter was founded in 2011 by Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation. As of 2023, the core editorial team consists of Tilman (as the editor-in-chief), Masssly, Abdul Rafiu Fuseini (User:Alhaj_Darajaati), Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini (User:Dnshitobu), Musah Fuseini (User:Musahfm) and Fuseini Mugisu Suhuyini (User:Sir_Amugi). Over 90 bylined contributors have volunteered reviews and writeups since 2011.

The associated @WikiResearch Twitter/X feed, where almost all covered papers are posted first, is run by Miriam Redi and Tilman, and has almost 18,000 followers as of December 2024. It is also available on Mastodon.

How to subscribe

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  • To receive the full text of each new issue in the form of an HTML email, sign up here.
  • The table of contents of each issue is cross-posted to the wiki-research-l mailing list.
  • Follow the @WikiResearch feed on   Twitter/X (also mirrored   on Facebook and on   mastodon.social). In addition to the monthly announcement of each new WRN issue, it also points to new preprints, papers or research-related blog posts before they are reviewed more fully in the upcoming issue. As of December 2024, we try to announce new issues of the newsletter on   on Bluesky, too.
  • The newsletter issues are also included in Wikipedia's The Signpost newspaper (which appears about once or twice per month), so if you subscribe to The Signpost, you'll receive the newsletter with your regular Signpost delivery to your Wikipedia talk page.

Archives

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Search the WRN archives

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Examples: Find research involving administrators / vandalism / pageviews / gender / Wiktionary / reverts.

Volume 14 (2024)

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Volume 13 (2023)

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Volume 12 (2022)

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Volume 11 (2021)

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(The May 2021 issue was skipped.)

Volume 10 (2020)

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Volume 9 (2019)

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Volume 8 (2018)

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(The December 2018 issue was skipped.)
(The March-April 2018 issues were skipped.)

Volume 7 (2017)

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(The October–December 2017 issues were skipped.)

Volume 6 (2016)

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Volume 5 (2015)

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Volume 4 (2014)

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  • WRN 4(12) – December 2014: Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting
  • WRN 4(11) – November 2014: Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures
  • WRN 4(10) – October 2014: Informed consent and privacy; newsmaking on Wikipedia; Wikipedia and organizational theories
  • WRN 4(9) – September 2014: 99.25% of Wikipedia birthdates accurate; focused Wikipedians live longer; merging WordNet, Wikipedia and Wiktionary
  • WRN 4(8) – August 2014: A Wikipedia-based Pantheon; new Wikipedia analysis tool suite; how AfC hamstrings newbies
  • WRN 4(7) – July 2014: Shifting values in the paid content debate; cross-language vandalism detection; translations from 53 Wiktionaries
  • WRN 4(6) – June 2014: Power users and diversity in WikiProjects; the "network of cultures" in multilingual Wikipedia biographies
  • WRN 4(5) – May 2014: Overview of research on Wikipedia's readers; predicting which article you will edit next
  • WRN 4(4) – April 2014: Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google; 43% of academics have edited Wikipedia
  • WRN 4(3) – March 2014: Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates; analysis of "In the news" discussions; user hierarchy mapped
  • WRN 4(2) – February 2014: CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism; like-minded editors clustered; Wikipedia stylistic norms as a model for academic writing
  • WRN 4(1) – January 2014: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years

Volume 3 (2013)

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Volume 2 (2012)

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  • WRN 2(12) – December 2012: Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined
  • WRN 2(11) – November 2012: Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons
  • WRN 2(10) – October 2012: WP governance informal; community as social network; efficiency of recruitment and content production; Rorschach news
  • WRN 2(9) – September 2012: "Rise and decline" of Wikipedia participation, new literature overviews, a look back at WikiSym 2012
  • WRN 2(8) – August 2012: New influence graph visualizations; NPOV and history; 'low-hanging fruit'
  • WRN 2(7) – July 2012: Conflict dynamics, collaboration and emotions; digitization vs. copyright; WikiProject field notes; quality of medical articles; role of readers; Best Wiki Paper Award
  • WRN 2(6) – June 2012: Edit war patterns, deleters vs. the 1%, never used cleanup tags, authorship inequality, higher quality from central users, and mapping the wikimediasphere
  • WRN 2(5) – May 2012: Supporting interlanguage collaboration; detecting reverts; Wikipedia's discourse, semantic and leadership networks, and Google's Knowledge Graph
  • WRN 2(4) – April 2012: Barnstars work; Wiktionary assessed; cleanup tags counted; finding expert admins; discussion peaks; Wikipedia citations in academic publications; and more
  • WRN 2(3) – March 2012: Predicting admin elections by editor status and similarity; flagged revision debates in multiple languages; Wikipedia literature reviewed
  • WRN 2(2) – February 2012: CSCW 2012 in review; gender gap and conflict aversion; collaboration on breaking news; effects of leadership on participation; legacy of Public Policy Initiative
  • WRN 2(1) – January 2012: Language analyses examine power structure and political slant; Wikipedia compared to commercial databases

Volume 1 (2011)

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Until 2018, issues were also published on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog.

How to contribute

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This newsletter would not be possible without contributions from the research and Wikimedia community. Newsletter contributors (either occasional or regular) are always welcome. Work on the upcoming edition is coordinated on an Etherpad, where you can sign up to cover a particular recent research publication from an independent perspective. Both full reviews and shorter summaries can be very valuable for our readers. The pad also contains the writing deadline and further advice. Feel free to contact us with questions.

We also welcome submissions of new projects, papers and datasets to be featured in the newsletter. You can add these directly to the current Etherpad, or bring them to our attention on Twitter/X. If you want your research project to be featured, please also create a new project page using the form on the research project directory. For anything else that might be of interest to our readers (such as code releases, events, CFPs, research blog posts) consider posting an announcement to wiki-research-l (we are monitoring this list on a regular basis) or get in touch directly. Separately, see here for how to contact the Research department of the Wikimedia Foundation about collaborations etc.

Open access vs. closed access publications

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Complete references of the publications featured in the newsletter can be found at the bottom of each issue. We aim to include a link to a freely accessible version whenever possible. Publications that are not open access (i.e. behind a paywall or tied to institutional subscriptions) will be marked with a closed access icon:

Dalip, Daniel Hasan, Raquel Lara Santos, Diogo Rennó Oliveira, Valéria Freitas Amaral, Marcos André Gonçalves, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Raquel C.M. Minardi, and Jussara Marques de Almeida (2011). GreenWiki: A tool to support users' assessment of the quality of Wikipedia articles. In Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL '11), 469. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. DOI  .

Corpus of covered research publications

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The inaugural issue of the WRN was published on July 25, 2011 – shortly after the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index and following two Signpost articles covering recent Wikimedia research.

The six issues published in the first volume (July–December 2011), featuring 87 unique publications, are available as a downloadable 45-page PDF, and a print version can be ordered from Pediapress. The full list of publications reviewed or covered in the Newsletter in 2011 can be browsed online or downloaded (as a BibTeX, RIS, PDF file or in other formats), ready to be imported into reference managers or other bodies of wiki research literature. Read more...

The twelve issues of the second volume (January–December 2012) covered 225 publications. This corpus can be browsed online on Zotero, or downloaded as BibTeX file from datahub.io. Read more...

Most of the publications covered in subsequent years, alongside some that have not been covered yet, are contained in less curated form in our Zotero library, comprising around 1800 items as of July 2020.

Contact

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For general queries on the research newsletter other than project or paper contributions you can leave a message on the talk page, send a DM on Twitter/X, or email wikiresearch-contact at googlegroups.com. Please note that for questions about Wikimedia-related research in general there are better venues, e.g. the wiki-research-l mailing list.