Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938
Wikipédia. Une somme originale de copies :
“Comment Wikipédia peut être le reflet du savoir d’une époque en rejetant la copie. La question de la copie vis-à-vis de Wikipédia est abordée à trois niveaux : 1/Wikipédia est une synthèse de la connaissance mais sa licence l’oblige à être foncièrement originale 2/Wikipédia comme copie des encyclopédies ou nouveau modèle 3/Wikipédia, source de textes prêts à être recopiés.”
URL : http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00724611
Readability of Wikipedia :
“Wikipedia is becoming widely acknowledged as a reliable source of encyclopedic information. However, concerns have been expressed about its readability. Wikipedia articles might be written in a language too difficult to be understood by most of its visitors. In this study, we apply the Flesch reading ease test to all available articles from the English Wikipedia to investigate these concerns. The results show that overall readability is poor, with 75 percent of all articles scoring below the desired readability score. The ‘Simple English’ Wikipedia scores better, but its readability is still insufficient for its target audience. A demo of our methodology is available at www.readabilityofwikipedia.com .”
URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3916/3297
Assessing the accuracy and quality of Wikipedia entries compared to popular online encyclopaedias :
“Previous studies, most notably the one carried out by the journal Nature in 2005, have sought to compare the quality of Wikipedia articles with that of similar articles in other online Encyclopaedias. In part as a result of the findings of such studies, Wikipedia has instigated a number of processes for assessing the quality of its entries, inviting readers and editors to rate articles according to criteria such as trustworthiness, neutrality, completeness and readability. Recently, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales highlighted the value of conducting a study which analysed articles across both languages and subjects to allow differences in levels of accuracy and quality across language and subject domains to be identified. The results could inform editor recruitment efforts and the design of expert feedback mechanisms.
The size, scope and complexity of undertaking such a large-scale study necessitated gathering preliminary evidence to inform the methodology and design. It was therefore decided that a small-scale preliminary project would be essential to determine a sound research methodology, which is the reason that the present pilot study was undertaken. The present study, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, presents the background, methodology, results and findings of a preliminary pilot conducted by Epic, a UK-based e-learning company, in partnership with the University of Oxford.”
URL : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf
Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia :
“Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.”
URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3613/3117
Wikipedia has been the subject of an increasing number of studies. Many of these have focused on the quality of Wikipedia articles and the use of Wikipedia by students. Little research has focused on the use of Wikipedia by scholars. This study helps to fill that gap by examining citations to Wikipedia in chemistry journals from three major publishers over a five year period.
The study reports the number of citations to Wikipedia and describes how Wikipedia is being cited. The results show that, while only a small percentage of all articles contained a citation to Wikipedia, it is in fact being cited as a credible information source in articles in major chemistry journals.
The visibility of Wikipedia in scholarly publications :
“Publications in the Institute of Scientific Information’s (ISI, currently Thomson Reuters) Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus databases were utilized to collect data about Wikipedia research and citations to Wikipedia. The growth of publications on Wikipedia research, the most active researchers, their associated institutions, academic fields and their geographic distribution are treated in this paper. The impact and influence of Wikipedia were identified, utilizing cited work found in (WoS) and Scopus. Additionally, leading authors, affiliated institutions, countries, academic fields, and publications that frequently cite Wikipedia are identified.”
URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3492/3031
Cross‐cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community :
“This paper reports a cross‐cultural analysis of four Wikipedias in different languages and demonstrates their roles as communities of practice (CoPs). Prior research on CoPs and on the Wikipedia community often lacks cross‐cultural analysis. Despite the fact that over 75% of Wikipedia is written in languages other than English, research on Wikipedia primarily focuses on the English Wikipedia and tends to overlook the Wikipedias in other languages. This paper first argues that Wikipedia communities can be analyzed and understood as CoPs. Second, norms of behaviors are examined in four Wikipedia languages (English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay), and the similarities and differences across these four languages are reported. Specifically, typical behaviors on three types of discussion spaces (Talk, User Talk, and Wikipedia Talk) are identified and examined across languages. Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural diversity as well as the size of the community, and the function of each discussion area provide lenses for understanding the similarities and differences. As such, this paper expands the research on online CoPs through an examination of cultural variations across multiple CoPs, and increases our understanding of Wikipedia communities in various languages.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15529