Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode66

Episode 66: Searching High and Low Released: December 4 2008

WikipediaWeekly Episode 66.

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Participants: Fuzheado, Witty Lama and Tawker.

Topics

• Google's search wiki
• Finding participants for Wikipedia studies and ethical treatment of them research-l discussions - "soliciting participants for Wikipedia studies" and "Ethnography of Wikipedia - need help designing an ethical protocol"
• Signpost's 200th edition, Wikizine's 100th [1].
• Fundraiser continues, interesting 'clickthrough' stats - foundation blog.
• Mailing list summary service provided by Phoebe
• New upload limits: from Signpost: " * After the upgrade of various Wikimedia file servers, the Wikimedia upload limit was increased from 20MB per file to 100MB per file, although Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber noted that the increased limit was experimental, and some larger files may be affected by post size limits." Sun servers, CNET.
• Arbcom election (Signpost) Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-11-24/ArbCom_elections
• Wikipedia.de taken offline for two days (Signpost) Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-11-24/In_the_news

Podcaster's Picks:

• User:Fuzheado/List_of_misleading_food_names
• Seven dirty words

• Joseph Reagle explanation:

I'll just note that my one brief experience in soliciting interviews
online was rather troubled (see below). Fortunately, for practical and
theoretical reasons I preferred making use of public practice and
discussion. In any case, should I need to do so again, the best
"interviews" I did make were by going to F2F meetings and connecting
with Wikipedians. This isn't a random or representative sample of
course.

[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/ethno/leadership.html

On a suggestion, I developed a brief questionnaire to engage with
editors of the Harry Potter Project pages but, as expected, received
few responses. Open content communities are, presently, often studied
(with similar questionnaires) and participants might have little
interest in taking time away from their actual (volunteer) work to
respond to yet another. (As a participant, I have never responded to
such a questionnaire.) Contacting actual participants can be difficult
as well, as Lorenzon (2005) noted: "Many editors have their own user
page which give information about them but few give out their real
names and contact information." I made my solicitation on the Talk
page for the Project as well as the Talk pages of a handful of
prominent editors, without much success. Additionally, because most
all the discourse is public and the community is otherwise so
reflective, there is an abundance of existing data situated in actual
practice. This is not to say such research discussions are not useful;
once I developed my questions I was interested in receiving answers
and the single response was informative. Fortunately, while responses
to questionnaires can be hard to obtain, I also do not think them
necessary to understand this community. Instead, one must follow (or
even engage) in the practice: "A culture is expressed (or constituted)
only by the actions and words of its members and must be interpreted
by, not given to, a field worker" (Van Maanen 1988).

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