(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of Wikimedia France.)
The impact of collaborative writing on the quality of Wikipedia content, new methods for monitoring contributions in order to fight vandalism, how the nature and quality of content depends on contributors’ status and the area covered, etc. These topics concern the Wikimedians who write and use Wikipedia… but also more and more researchers!
By launching an international award for research on Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, Wikimédia France wants to highlight these research works, encourage them and especially, make them understandable and accessible to the Wikimedia community.
Starting in July, the first step was to ask the community of researchers that study Wikimedia projects to nominate scientific papers that they consider the most influential and important from the years 2003 to 2011. We collected more than 30 proposals, each satisfying the selection criteria: Available under open access and published in peer-reviewed publications. It is thanks to a quality jury, composed of researchers working on these topics, that we could select five finalists papers among these. You can find summaries and full texts linked below:
- Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave, published in 2004.
- DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data by Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak and Zachary Ives, published in 2007.
- A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia by Thomas Adler and Luca de Alfaro, published in 2007.
- Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia by Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen and John Riedl, published in 2007.
- Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past by Roy Rosenzweig, published in 2006.
To decide the winner, Wikimédia France wishes to encourage all Wikimedians to give their opinion and vote for the paper that seems the most stimulating and relevant.
Voting will close on Monday, March 11. The announcement of the winning paper is scheduled for the end of March. The authors will receive a grant of €2,500. They can freely allocate this sum, provided it is dedicated to help open knowledge research.
Carol Ann O’Hare
Wikimedia France
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