Submissions/Understanding Wikimedians: Practical Tools for Academic Research

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.

Title of the submission

Understanding Wikimedians: Practical Tools for Academic Research

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Workshop

Author of the submission

Doug Divine, Jonathan Morgan (presenting author), Jamie Ourada, Mark Zachry

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

jmo25@uw.edu, jourada@uw.edu

Country of origin

United States

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

University Of Washington, Communicative Practices in Virtual Workspaces Laboratory

Personal homepage or blog

http://courses.washington.edu/commprac/index.html (English)

30-word contribution & benefits statement

This workshop will stimulate conversation on tool-based methods and best practices for researching online collaboration, and will demonstrate one approach to this type of research through a demonstration of the QBox tool.

Proposed time frame (1h or 2h or 4h)

1 Hour

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

Around the world, an increasing number of researchers are studying how people use, and contribute to, Wikimedia Projects. Understanding the social dynamics of wiki-based communities is no easy task, and conducting meaningful research can be difficult. Having a robust set of tools to aid this work is vital to gaining a meaningful understanding.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together people interested in the development and use of tools and methodologies for studying the social and communicative practices of Wiki-based communities.Topics would include:

• Existing tools for evaluating content and conduct in a Wiki environment

• Opportunities to leverage open-source software to create customized research tools

• Ways to learn from others’ successes and failures

• Considerations for the design of research tools for studying wiki-based interaction

The proposed workshop would be moderated by Jonathan Morgan, a member of the Communicative Practices in Virtual Workspaces research group at the University of Washington in Seattle. This group is focused on the investigation of emergent uses of digital technologies to coordinate work activities.

In order to stimulate conversation, the moderator will also present a demonstration of one such tool, called QBox. QBox is a Drupal-based online content analysis tool created by the CommPrac group in order to facilitate our ongoing research on the communicative practices of Wikipedians. QBox allows researchers to evaluate and classify live web content in vivo. We welcome any feedback on our tool, which is still under development, including: potential use cases, criticisms, suggestions for additional functionality or improvement of existing functionality, and usability.

Anyone who has developed, has a need for, or is just interested in, research tools to evaluate Wiki behavior and content are welcome to co-present the workshop.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure)

Knowledge and Collaboration

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

To be added

Interested attendees

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