Research:University of Virginia/Wikipedia Quality Index

This page documents a planned research project.
Information may be incomplete and change before the project starts.


Problem

edit

Problem Description Wikipedia is the world’s largest collaborative educational project: Every day, the corps of volunteer editors are improving the quality of content on the encyclopedia. We’ve never, however, been able to measure the quality of content on Wikipedia, and how it changes over time. In this project, we will create a Wikipedia Quality Index where we can measure quality overall and in certain topic areas at different points in time, to be able to see improvement year over year. Wiki Education Foundation, as a nonprofit that runs programs about generating content on the English Wikipedia, is also interested in measuring how much of the change in quality can be attributed to their work.

Objective

edit

Our objective is to create a Wikipedia Quality Index: A measurement that can be taken at any point in time of the quality of content overall on Wikipedia, as well as the general quality in broad topic areas (e.g., “biology”).

Timeline

edit
Late August 2019
Students select research projects from an available pool
Late September 2019
Proposal presentation
May 2020
Project ends

Data

edit

Deliverables

edit
  1. Research Proposal
  2. Data Product
  3. Technical Paper
  4. Research Poster
  5. Slides
  6. Presentation of research at local conference in Charlottesville, Virginia
  7. video presentation?
  8. essay on ethics?
  9. method documentation?

Research Team

edit
  • ???