browsing

:::: research(ers)

On the Meta Wiki you find a — surely non-complete — list with reseachers who tackle the ‘wiki-issue’ from all kind of angles. On this wiki-site and also here you find a list of different phD theses, articles, and conference papers containing analysis of Wikipedia. For research(ers), lectures, and seminars in German see this wiki-site of the de_Wikipedia.

Erik Borra is programmer as well as researcher and is particulary interested in mapping controversies of the (social) web, also wikipedia conflicts.

Felix Stalder takes Wikipedia as example where Open Source/FOSS migrates to Open Culture.

Kiran Jonnalagadda has an interesting collection of Wikipedia bookmarks.

Mark Graham is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institutend and presents us the spatial contours of Wikipedia through analysis of geotagged Wikipedia articles.

Mayo Fuster Morell keeps you updated with her research on Online Community Governance.

Nate Tkacz examines Wikpedia in order to deal with the political category of the ‘open’  in contemporary network cultures.

Stefania Milan is interested in infoactivsim and looks at grassroots developers of communication infrastructures from a  social movements research perspective.

Stuart Geiger‘s work helps a lot if you like to understand the ‘political’ in the socio-political spaces of the digital.

Trebor Schulz provides huge amounts of information about social web, networked sociality, & activism.

:::: research projects and hubs

The Centre for Internet and Society critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices and does also Wikipedia research.

Critical Point of View is a Wikipedia research initiative with places itself outside of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation.

The Digital Media and Learning Research Hub blogs about “research in the service of a more equitable, participatory, and effective ecosystem of learning keyed to the digital and networked era”.

The Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre investigates media spaces by examining public life and social relations.

The Institute of Network Cultures does not only look at cyberculture but strives also to offer an active contribution to socio-technological change .

The world-information.org provides critical discussion about digital technologies & (future) global developments.

Different perspectives and resources around the issue of democratic, particpatory public sphere can be also found by browsing the Media Research Hub.

Developing alternative information and communications’ systems that empower users as citizens is the ambitious goal of  the Public Sphere Project directed by Doug Schuler.

Bringing researchers together is the aim of the ECPR standing group on Internet & Politics…

…as well as the aim of the Wikimedia Research Network.

:::: journals & books & other sources

Critical Studies in Peer Production is a peer-reviewed journal that looks at the implications of peer production for social change.

First Monday is a  peer-reviewed online journal on the Internet devoted to Internet.

The Global Civil Society Yearbook guides to global civil society. The yearbook 2007/8 focuses on communicative power and democracy.

Public Netbase: Non Stop Future reflects amongst other things about politics of digital media culture.

Re-public is an online journal providing space for contributions to political theory. You find here also a bunch of articles about wiki politics and the social web.

triple C calls itself a “Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society” .

On the Zotero platform you can find a collection of  Wikipedia research materials/papers.

(If you do Wiki/Wikipedia research yourself and look for journals to publish your ideas and findings, you find an English list of open access journals composed by Wikipedia user JakobVoss here.)

:::: tools for researching the web & in particular the Wikipedia

wikidashboard shows who editited what in an wikpedia article

govcom.org provides ‘political’ tools for the web such as the issue crawler.

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) strives to provide tools & impulses for ‘digital grounded’ research. In 2009 the DMI dealt in its summer school in particular with tools that are suitable for the analysis of controversities on the Wikipedia.

History Flow (ibm) promises to visualize the editing history of Wikipedia pages. Quick to handle but does not seem to considered archived versions. Viusalisations can be exported as far as I know only by screenshot. Also no possibilty to save the files and to define a given time span of analysis.

The history of a lemma can be also traced by using WikiHistory which was developed by de:user:APPERand which in my opinion gives a nice overview e.g. by providing user and edit statitics as well as the number of total edits of one lemma (main space).  Also here is no opportunity to define a certain time span for analysis and to save your searches, though there is a cache function. The author analysis which links text to users can take very long. Data export is not possible but wiki syntax can be copied. For more see talk page of de:user:APPER.

If you are only interested in contributers statistics you can work with the online tool provided by de:user:Duesentrieb.

Many Eyes (ibm) provides tools for visualization of different kind of data such as values or words. These interactive visualisation can only be saved by screenshots. Your datasets and visualisations are published on the sites to give others the opportunity to work also with them.

I also work with a script which caputures intra-Wikipedia networks in terms of in- and outlinks of certain main name spaces to other. You find it here. The data you retrieve can be feeded in the ManyEyes tool.

:::: wikipedians/-medians & wp_friends/_observers

Best updated you are on the Planet Wikimedia which aggregates posts from various Wikimedia community members.

Andrew Lih is an active Wikipedian – he hosts the Wikipedia Weekly roundtable audio podcast . In 2009 he has written the book  ‘The Wikipedia Revolution’ which portrays in a narrative, non-fiction manner the evolution and story of the Wikipedia community.

Jimmy Wales aka ‘Jimbo’, co-founder and promoter of the Wikipedia blogs here.

notafish is interested in intercultural communication and fundraising, you find her thoughts here and here.

Some entries of the Masters of Media blog – a student project on literature review around new media – deal with the question of (critical) Wikipedia research.

Noam Cohen from the The New York Times reports regularly about the Wikipedia.

User witty lama is not only contributing to so called meta work but also wrote his thesis about ‘The Academic Lineage of Wikipedia: Connections and Disconnections in the Theory and Practice of History’.

:::: projects on creating/collecting (alternative) knowledge

Gendergap is a mailing list discussing trategies and approaches that could be used to increase female participation in Wikimedia projects.

Levitation describes itself as a project that is “working on designing a vision for a new, crowd-driven, decentralized way to collect all human knowledge”. The project converts the Wikipedia database into Git repositories. In doing so it strives to built up a decentralized administration giving the user the possibility to decide what he/she likes to read.

Wikipedia Art “promotes critical analyses of the nature of art, knowledge and Wikipedia”.

Wikiartpedia understands itself as a free encyclopedia of telematic art and culture.

WikiChix is both a wiki and a mailinglist  for female wiki editors to “discuss issues of gender bias in wikis, to promote wikis to potential female editors, and for general discussion of wikis in a friendly female-only environment”. WikiChix is a space open for female Wikipedia contributors and deals with Wiki collaboration in general.

Wiki Women’s Collaborative is a project that aims at inspiring women to contribute to Wikipedia.

:::: beautiful visualizations

Information is beautiful depicts the “lamest edit wars” in English Wikipedia from 2001 to 2004+.

Notabilia visualizes 100 deletion debates in the English Wikipedia.