Panelists
Pnina Shachaf, Indiana University
Ewa Callahan, Quinnipiac University
Besiki Stvilia, Florida State University
Sorin Matei, Purdue University
Pnina Shachaf - Cross-cultural analysis of Wikipedia: Norms of behavior
This presentation focused on differences in Wikipedia entries when compared to entries in other languages. There are over 250 different languages in Wikipedia, English the largest with over 23% of the articles written in that language. While most of the research focuses on English in Wikipedia, not much is known about it in other languages. Most of the research is done on quality but not on the process of mass collaboration.
Ewa Callahan - Wikipedia Entries on Famous Person in Polish and English
The specific research question was asking "are Wikipedia entries on the same topic different in different languages and if so, how?" The broad question is "would monolingual readers of Wikipedia be disadvantaged if they only had access to the entries in their native language?"
Some findings from this are that English entries are longer and have more notes and references plus external links. There is more personal information, more controversy, and more mentioned of nationality. The study compared to Polish entries which had more lists.
Besiki Stvilla - Problems of Cross-Language Quality Measurement Aggregation and Reasoning
I didn't take many notes here, just a couple of questions I jotted down. Probably not useful at this point because they don't make sense to me right now.
Sorin Matei - Wikipedia Articles and Traffic Statistics
This was an interesting presentation, unfortunately I think I missed a lot of it because of personal issues going on at the same time, but I believe the most interesting point that came out of this presentation is how Wikipedia is a "snapshot of the collective conscious". He mentioned that some of Wikipedia is not encyclopedic, but some of it is. The analogy he gave was that it was a "giant vacuum cleaner that collects everything that is of interest to humans."
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