Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-17/Recent research
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Wikipedia and open access
- Reviewed by Nicolas Jullien
From the abstract:[1]:
"we analyze a large dataset of citations from Wikipedia and model the role of open access in Wikipedia's citation patterns. We find that open-access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia. What is more, they show a 15% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when compared to closed-access articles, after controlling for confounding factors. This open-access citation effect is particularly strong for articles with low citation counts, including recently published ones. Our results show that open access plays a key role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, including by providing Wikipedia editors timely access to novel results."
Why does it matter for the Wikipedia community?
This article is a first draft of an analysis of the relationship between the availability of a scientific journal as open access and the fact that it is cited in the English Wikipedia (note: although it speaks of "Wikipedia", the article looks only at the English pages). It is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed, so its results should be read with caution, especially since I am not sure about the robustness of the model and the results derived from it (see below). It is of course a very important issue, as access to scientific sources is key to the diffusion of scientific knowledge, but also, as the authors mention, because Wikipedia is seen as central to the diffusion of scientific facts (and is sometimes used by scientists to push their ideas).
Review
The results presented in the article (and its abstract) highlight two important issues for Wikipedia that will likely be addressed in a more complete version of the paper:
- The question of the reliability of the sources used by Wikipedians
- => the regressions seem to indicate that the reputation of the journal is not important to be cited in Wikipedia.
- => Predatory journals are known to be more often open access than classical journals, which means that this result potentially indicates that the phenomenon of open access reduces the seriousness of Wikipedia sources.
The authors say on p. 4 that they provided "each journal with an SJR score, H-index, and other relevant information." Why did they not use this as a control variable? (this echoes a debate on the role of Wikipedia: is it to disseminate verified knowledge, or to serve as a platform for the dissemination of new theories? The authors seem to lean towards the second view: p. 2: "With the rapid development of the Internet, traditional peer review and journal publication can no longer meet the need for the development of new ideas".)
- The solidity of the results
- The authors said: "STEM fields, especially biology and medicine, comprise the most prominent scientific topics in Wikipedia [17]." "General science, technology, and biomedical research have relatively higher OA rates."
- => So, it is obvious that, on average, there are more citations of Open Access articles in Wikipedia (than in the entire available research corpus), and explain that open access articles are cited more.
- => Why not control for discipline in the models?
More problematic (and acknowledged by the authors, so probably in the process of being addressed), the authors said, on p.7, that they built their model with the assumption that the age of a research article and the number of citations it has both influence the probability of an article being cited in Wikipedia.
Of course, for this causal effect to hold, the age and the number of citations must be taken into account at the moment the article is cited in Wikipedia (if some of the citations are made after the citation in Wikipedia, one could argue that the causal effect could be in the other direction). For example, many articles are open access after an embargo period, and are therefore considered open access in the analysis, whereas they may have been cited in Wikipedia when they were under embargo. The authors did not check for this, as acknowledged in the last sentence of the article => would the result be as robust if they do their model taking the first citation in the English Wikipedia, for example, and the age of the article, its open access status, etc. at that moment)?
In short
Although this first draft is probably not solid enough to be cited in Wikipedia, it signals important research in progress, and I am sure that the richness of the data and the quality of the team will quickly lead to very interesting insights for the Wikipedia community.
Related earlier coverage
- "Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia" (about a 2020 paper that among other results found that "open access sources [...] are particularly popular" with readers)
- "English Wikipedia lacking in open access references" (2022)
"Controversies over Historical Revisionism in Wikipedia"
- Reviewed by Andreas Kolbe
From the abstract:[2]
This study investigates the development of historical revisionism on Wikipedia. The edit history of Wikipedia pages allows us to trace the dynamics of individuals and coordinated groups surrounding controversial topics. This project focuses on Japan, where there has been a recent increase in right-wing discourse and dissemination of different interpretations of historical events.
This brief study, one of the extended abstracts accepted at the Wiki Workshop (10th edition), follows up on reports that some historical pages on the Japanese Wikipedia, particularly those related to World War II and war crimes, have been edited in ways that reflect radical right-wing ideas (see previous Signpost coverage). It sets out to answer three questions:
- What types of historical topics are most susceptible to historical revisionism?
- What are the common factors for the historical topics that are subject to revisionism?
- Are there groups of editors who are seeking to disseminate revisionist narratives?
The study focuses on the level of controversy of historical articles, based on the consideration that the introduction of revisionism is likely to lead to edit wars. The authors found that the most controversial historical articles in the Japanese Wikipedia were indeed focused on areas that are of particular interest to revisionists. From the findings:
Articles related to WWII exhibited significantly greater controversy than general historical articles. Among the top 20 most controversial articles, eleven were largely related to Japanese war crimes and right-wing ideology. Over time, the number of contributing editors and the level of controversy increased. Furthermore, editors involved in edit wars were more likely to contribute to a higher number of controversial articles, particularly those related to right-wing ideology. These findings suggest the possible presence of groups of editors seeking to disseminate revisionist narratives.
The paper establishes that articles covering these topic areas in the Japanese Wikipedia are contested and subject to edit wars. However, it does not measure to what extent article content has been compromised. Edit wars could be a sign of mainstream editors pushing back against revisionists, while conversely an absence of edit wars could indicate that a project has been captured (cf. the Croatian Wikipedia). While this little paper is a useful start, further research on the Japanese Wikipedia seems warranted.
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- Reviewed by ....
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
- ...
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
- Compiled by ...
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From the abstract:
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References
- ^ Yang, Puyu; Shoaib, Ahad; West, Robert; Colavizza, Giovanni (2023-05-23), Wikipedia and open access, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2305.13945
- ^ Kim, Taehee; Garcia, David; Aragón, Pablo (2023-05-11). "Controversies over Historical Revisionism in Wikipedia" (PDF). Wiki Workshop (10th edition).
- Supplementary references and notes:
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
Images and Galleries
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Side frames
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A caption
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Discuss this story
Presumably the preprint about WiCE, after giving the example quoted above, goes on to discuss the problems with both the sentence from the article Santa Maria della Pietà, Prato ("13th-century icon" is not supported by the source) and the "sub-claims" GPT-3 generated from it (clearly the "icon" can't be both 13th-century and from 1638)? If so, what does it say? I think the original source has misunderstood that the 14th-century image itself (attributed to Giovanni Bonsi), as opposed to a "depiction of the miraculous event" (unspecified, but it occurred in the 17th century), is the fresco at the centre of the later altarpiece (painted by Mario Balassi in 1638, and on canvas rather than in fresco according to the Italian Wikipedia article), so that doesn't help. Ham II (talk) 11:23, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks and small correction on Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin
Thanks for covering this work! One small correction RE:
This was true of the earliest version of the plugin, but for production we've switched to leveraging the Wikimedia Search API to find articles matching the user's query. We'll update the docs/README to reflect this (our quick R&D on this outpaced our technical documentation, but catching up now)! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
"google_search_is_enabled"), but that the latter is selected as the preferred search provider right now in the settings. (Feel free to correct me as I may have misread the code.)