Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-23/Recent research

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Nicely done. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:37, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Indeed! Great reviews, thank you very much. (And I'm glad there is someone reading the Marxist theoretical approach to Wikipedia, because I'd rather not have to do it myself.... ;) ) The Land (talk) 15:55, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

• Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism is a 350 page book that I have not finished reading so I cannot speak to all of it, but Dorothy's summary of the premise is fair enough. I do worry about commercial interests exploiting the goodwill of Wikimedia contributors. At the same time, I also feel like Wikimedia projects are significant beyond just the content that they host. Among the top 500 websites as ranked by Alexa Internet, there are only a few noncommercial organizations present (checked October 2016): 5. Wikipedia 99. BBC (US), 105. BBC (UK), 137. The Pirate Bay, 192. Mozilla, 227. Internet Archive, 234. National Institutes of Health, 423. United States Postal Service. Among those, only Wikipedia and maybe Internet Archive are seeking to provide a community space for everyone to participate in noncommercial service for everyone else. I feel like Wikipedia might be the last public space that the world might know for some generations, because in every other non-niche outlet there are commercial interests grabbing for any scrap of data or attention that they can extract from anyone. If public media ever mattered then Wikimedia projects are preserving that community space and trying to stake claims to keep it for the future. If it is ever lost then maybe it could be gone for a long time. It is unfortunate that so much Wikimedia project success depends on the labor of so few volunteers who give so much and get use for their research, writing, photography and the rest by commercial organizations who take but do not give back their fair share or social due. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:50, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
• Rather interesting research. Thanks for pointing us to the paper by Kummer et al. It is hard to believe that is took more than a year and a half until it has reached the community. — You might like to know that Günter Schuler as early as 2007 in his book Wikipedia inside (207ff, 214ff) argued that the blossoming of Web 2.0 which Wikipedia is a part of was after all mostly due to the wave of neoliberalism which had increased an interest in "sense" and idealistic values vs. economical effectiveness, metrics etc., fuelling the influx of editors to blogs, and wikis in the period 2000—2005. So there seems to be a constant point it the Zeitreichen, or those rich in time and leasure, mostly keep editing the web.--Aschmidt (talk) 22:12, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

• A minor comment: The authors are not three economists from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany, but rather: Michael Kummer (from Georgia Institute of Technology), Olga Slivko(an economist from ZEW), and Michael Zhang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.196.11.188 (talk) 08:44, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

• Always great to have new research on Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia, work, and capitalism. A realm of freedom?"

He claims that the anti-corporatist ideologies intrinsic to peer production and to Wikipedia are unrealistic because capitalism always finds a way to monetize free content.

I'd disagree for two reasons: first off who says that such anti-corporatist ideologies necessarily have a problem with capitalism monetizing free content? For instance I don't have a problem with companies making profits from my any of my contributions online even without attribution (as long as my contributions themselves remain open in such a way that they could theoretically also be used for non-profit projects). Also companies monetizing free content can be constructive for society as well and within the current structure in many cases it might not be feasible (due to time/resources required) for non-profit projects to put such content to use in the same way.

Secondly capitalism will simply be overcome. I'm stating this that confidently not only because our socioeconomic system has changed many times in human history but because everything points to our civilization collapsing / we as a species actually dying out if we don't manage to change our socioeconomic structures within the next few decades in ways that are so fundamental as to warrant a new name for the succeeding model. And imo Wikipedia is part of the paradigm that is already overturning capitalism from within and which already employs the logic of a (imo that) new model.

One recurrent theme is that Wikipedia is part of a larger trend in gamification—a design technique developed in Human–computer interaction (HCI) to describe the process of using features associated with "play" to motivate interaction and engagement with an interface. One example he gives is that editors report that they find Wikipedia's competitive and confrontational elements to be game-like.

I don't think interactions with and on Wikipedia could largely be described as applying gamification. Gamification is the active application of typical game playing elements such as point scoring, awards and competitions to non-game / work-like processes. None of that is really done on Wikipedia - there are edit counts, thank yous and barnstars etc but most don't pay attention to them / use them and mostly (and most importantly) they're not actively applied to motivate engagement. There is some low-profile, marginal gamification going on on Wikipedia - but describing Wikipedia as being "part of a larger trend in gamification" would imo be plain out wrong.
Even less prevalent examples of gamification on Wikipedia would be: CitationHunt and The WikiData game and two suggested gamification elements would be: an auto-congratulatory feature and Edit counts of subject-area editors / WikiProject leaderboards.

Still, it’s highly questionable whether the 8 interviews, which mainly focus on the Swedish Wikipedia, are a sufficient sample size to make his claims scalable.

Good remark. Such a type of interviews is an outdated mode of gaining insights / feedback and I don't think they are sufficient.

To him, Wikipedia is symptomatic of the devaluation of digital work, when in past generations, making an encyclopedia might be a source of income and employment opportunities for contributors.

What a strange way to look at this. It does not devalue digital work. Actually it values knowledge so highly that it has to be disassociated from monetary incentives. Societally highly constructive work such as contributions to open knowledge, open data and online encyclopedias should actually be valued by society so that people who engage in such can allocate their full time to it. But it isn't. Which means society should to change. And with that − at least in the case of Wikipedia − I'm less referring to the mentality of people but to the societal structures that organize people's self-sustenance and work-allocation (such as the kinds of "monetary income" and "employment" we know of thus far).

But from his view, attempts at a “counter-economy,” “hacker communism,” or “gift economies” (239, 303) are prone to manipulation, because we can’t create utopian bubbles within capitalism that aren’t privy to its influence.

That's one reason why projects such as Wikipedia need to remain highly adaptive and find proper mechanisms and measures to thwart such "manipulations". I don't think Wikipedia has been manipulated at its core even though its surrounding capitalism causes e.g. marketers to attempt to use it in the most beneficial way.

why Wikipedians might feel like they are playing when they are really working

I don't think that Wikipedians in general or in large numbers "feel like they are playing when they are really working". I think it's a new mode of engagement that is not accurately described as either. Something akin to prosumptive, interactive learning/contributing. To me it's more fun than playing because you will actually achieve sth / have an impact / be constructive in a meaningful way.

Lund makes a compelling case that capitalism instrumentalizes freely-produced knowledge for its own monetary gains. Meanwhile, he says, Wikipedia's design and its heavily ideological agenda, make it difficult for the community to address the issue.

Did he also explain why that would be an issue at all?

How does unemployment affect reading and editing Wikipedia ? The impact of the Great Recession

Concerning the remarks of what data the researcher could also have used: it would be a good idea to have researchers announce (the subject of) their research somewhere so that people can help by providing relevant data, crowdsource information and provide technical support etc. This should probably be done for all kinds of research (in streamlined manners) but let's start with research on Wikipedia.

And as a relevant sidenote I've become jobless recently and you'll likely to see my contributions spike (once I got some other issues fixed) as I now have more time for Wikipedia (& FOSS) which I consider way more constructive for society and self-actualizing than work within the market economy, generating profits etc. Sadly I won't be able to sustain this situation (of joblessness) for long. Note that imo that doesn't really affect what I stated in my comments about the book above - I enjoy being jobless (as long as I can also safely meet my basic needs etc; won't be able to sustain it for long but maybe I can establish a similar situation in a year or so) and I'm not frustrated with the current system but think it's outdated.

"Extracting scientists from Wikipedia"

There should be a global IT system which in effect maps people to their expertise and skills which can then be effectively made use of by those in need for such, aiming to collaborate or exchange or engage in relevant projects. I don't think Wikipedia is very efficient in such as it only features a fraction of notable scientists. It needs a new project / website to do this (which might start off with data gained from Wikipedia).

"Where the streets have known names"

This might be relevant to Wikipedia:Smart city uses of Wikipedia.

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And as a sidenote, relevant to my comments above, it imo also needs a proper IT system which indexes research and allows feedback and continuation etc beyond other academic research and the press simply picking up/referencing it.

--Fixuture (talk) 22:38, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

@Fixuture: I agree that Wikipedia isn't gamified in the sense that one might expect (compared to for instance Stack Overflow), but as you mention there are places where it pops up. In addition to the ones you point to, there's the Wikipedia Adventure, which has recently been published at a research conference (see this blog post for more info). Secondly, there's the WikiCup, which I studied in our 2015 CSCW paper about quality improvement projects (PDF here) and found some behaviour that was very similar to what you see when it comes to badges in Stack Overflow: participants get points for Good Articles, but nothing for B-class quality, so they rarely (if ever) stop at the latter. Given that these game-like elements pop up in several places, I'm not surprised that participants would describe Wikipedia in ways that can be interpreted as the site being "game-like". Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:30, 30 June 2017 (UTC)