Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-10-31/Recent research

← Back to Recent research

Discuss this story

Regarding the one in every 200 pageviews leading to a citation ref click, that's surprisingly low given the editor-side emphasis on WP:RS. It would be good to see more students being explicitly taught information literacy and best practices specifically for reading Wikipedia. The nearest reader-side resources I know of within Wikipedia are Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual/Appendixes/Reader's_guide_to_Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Research_help don't really cover the relevant topics e.g. why and how to check the references. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 01:33, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

"All Talk" flaws

This study may have measured the wrong things. The goal was assumed to be "productivity" as defined by article contributions, but there was no theoretical justification given for this decision. Currently, the best model for what we want to see happen for newcomers is that their first edits aren't reverted, and that the editors stick around and stay active for a long time. See meta:Research:New_editors'_first_session_and_retention. Adamw (talk) 13:39, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Adamw:, I'm one of the authors of that study. Thank you so much for taking a look at our work and for your comments. We chose to focus on "productivity" based on theories about the relationship between communication and productivity in teams and organizations. Your suggestion to look at how much newcomers were reverted is certainly an interesting question and one that we could answer with a relatively simple extension of our analysis. Looking at newcomer retention is also a good idea, but it would be more complicated because it may not mesh nicely with the statistical method we used.

By the way, we will publish the data and code in the near future here [1] (at the moment there is nothing at that link, but someday soon there will be). It would be exciting to see community members take that up to answer their own questions that we didn't answer. Groceryheist (talk) 04:14, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Characterizing Reader Behavior on Wikipedia

Anyone else notice the striking statistic that over 1/3rd of English Wikipedia readers are not native English speakers? I'm a native English speaker and have a hard time reading a lot of our articles (due to the high prevalence of jargon, overly complex run-on sentences, and mangled grammar). Perhaps we should make more of an effort to make our articles readable rather than trying (poorly) to make them sound academic and erudite. Kaldari (talk) 15:30, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

That's a good point. There has also been quite a bit of research on readability of Wikipedia articles (most of it based on automated readability scores; it might be interesting to run actual reading comprehension tests where a reader is asked questions about information they should be able to derive from an article).

Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:20, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Image for Wikidata item

Is there a particular point in using an image that shows only women to illustrate the Wikidata item about knowledge graphs? I don't want to make any assumptions here, other than that it seems obvious that someone (singular or plural) made the decision and had reasons for it. – Athaenara ✉ 19:15, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Apologies if I've misunderstood the point you were getting at, but I'm not sure I see the problem with the image. If the worry is that slide 9 in that presentation wasn't appropriate, if they had used the diagram that has both male and female examples (slide 21), the images would have been very small. If the worry is that it over-prioritises depictions of women, this month's Signpost included images of 9 men and 9 women (excluding crowd photos and excluding traffic report, which were more male-biased), so I don't think women have been over-represented. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:18, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any role for "worry" in this. Aside from that, do I understand you correctly as having meant that any of the other available images would have been too small? – Athaenara ✉ 05:50, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

I apologise if I came across as combative. Speaking to the original question, I think that the particular point of using that image was to illustrate the overall content of the presentation in a single picture, and the slide chosen is the best one to achieve that. It is a simple image, it's relatively large, it summarises a key concept discussed in the presentation. The fact that it depicts three women is an added benefit. I'd agree with your original post that probably its inclusion in the article is the result of a decision. That's only my opinion on the image, but I've no other guesses as to why it was used or why any other image would have been better. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:00, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

As a woman myself, with long-time interests in mathematics, science, and literature, I do not see why it is "an added benefit" that the image "depicts three women". When I think of Nobel laureates I think of emblematic greats like Ernest Rutherford or William Faulkner and wouldn't for a moment expect that images of recent winners who happen to be women should be placed at the forefront. – Athaenara ✉ 09:18, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

T.Shafee is correct that I picked this particular slide from the deck for the summary here because it seemed the best to visually illustrate the paper's main topic. ("Everybody who was awarded the Nobel Prize has a nobel prize ID")

Akorenchkin, the researcher who uploaded the slide deck, could probably speak to why he and his coauthors chose these particular three examples (Strickland, Curie, Arnold), but my hunch would be that they had recent controversies in mind.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:34, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

@HaeB: Thank you for bringing some of the Wikipedia-specific context to light, I appreciate that. – Athaenara ✉ 10:14, 6 December 2019 (UTC)