Research:Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011
This Summer the Wikimedia Foundation will be bringing in a handful of graduate students to work with the Community Department, led by Diederik van Liere and Maryana Pinchuk, on a few months of rapid iterations on vital research questions related to the recruitment and retention of new editors on Wikipedia. This page is a placeholder for links to our announcements and preliminary research. If you have any questions or are a Wikimedian interested in participating in either quantitative or qualitative research, please comment on the Talk page.
Preliminary work
These datasets and analyses are mostly test cases for the rest of the work for the summer, but do suggest some interesting trends nonetheless. Our basic methodologies are described below.
Assessing quality of the first edits made by new editors, 2004 and 2011
How many contributions by new editors are made in good faith and are worth retaining or improving? Are most edits by newbies vandalism or spam, or are they made primarily in good faith?
We selected a randomized sample of first edits by contributors who joined in April 2004 and in April 2011, derived via simple SQL query run against the toolserver. We then analyzed these edits by hand, ranking the first edit on a 1-5 scale, with one being pure vandalism and five being a verified content addition indistinguishable from the edit of an experienced contributor. We also noted when the first edit was not a mainspace contribution, and whether that was vandalism or not.
Results are described at: "How much do new editors actually improve Wikipedia?"
We'll publish the totals data shortly, but the actual samples will not be distributed to avoid calling out individual editors by name.