WikiResearch

A manifesto for Wikimedia research: Critically studying Wikimedia as infrastructure

I am pleased to announce the launch of the Manifesto for Wikimedia Research manifesto.wiki. As my co-authored Big Data & Society commentary explains, the manifesto is dedicated to a humanist and critical tradition of taking Wikipedia's importance seriously. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Presenter (Patrick Gildersleve) in front of a screen summarising the WikiReddit Dataset project. The slide describes it as "Every Wikipedia mention and link on Reddit, 2020-2023", includes some example usage, describes the scale of the dataset, and offers suggested use cases.

Had a great time meeting everyone and seeing all the interesting work @icwsm.bsky.social. I presented our study on the Wikireddit dataset - exploring Wikipedia’s role in fact-checking, discussion, and cross-platform attention on the web. Thank you to the organisers!

📄: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

The Challenge of Peer-Produced Websites | UW College of Arts & Sciences Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill studies why successful peer-produced websites (like Wikipedia) eventually struggle to maintain their openness to new contributors.

UW published this really nice article about my work on governance challenges and lifecycles faced by peer-produced online communities—the work supported by my NSF CAREER grant. Check it out if you want to know what I've been thinking about and working on!

Desambiguación en Wikipedia: exploración de los mecanismos de control de autoridades en la enciclopedia colaborativa por @florenciac.bsky.social y @tsaorin.bsky.social en #revistainfonomy
doi.org/10.3145/info...

#Controldeautoridades #Vocabularioscontrolados #Wikipedia

Been a hectic semester for me but made it through 😊 a few updates

Had a blast as a GSI for @dbamman.bsky.social NLP class. Was a wonderful experience 💃

Won the Wikipedia Foundation Research of The Year Award for our CHI paper(doi.org/10.1145/3613...) with @schasins.bsky.social and John Canny

findings: (1) Wikipedia is most frequently cited by news and science websites for informational purposes, while commercial websites reference it less often. (2) The majority of Wikipedia links appear within the main content rather than in boilerplate [3/5 of https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15837v1]

Whipped up a #WikiWorkshop 2025 recap blog post here: rhododendrites.com/posts/WikiWo... @wikiresearch.bsky.social Some really interesting tools, methods, and studies over the last couple days!

Templates and sovereignty: Wikipedia’s policy development and the reflection of community consensus - Steve Jankowski, Claudio Celis Bueno, Ouejdane Sabbah, Jakko Kemper, 2025 This article examines how Wikipedians embed their sovereign authority within the development of the site’s multilingual policy environment. By drawing on the co...

Well this is good timing. @wikiworkshop.bsky.social starts today and my paper that I presented in previous years has just been published this morning. doi.org/10.1177/1461.... We describe how hatnotes on policy pages are incredibly important techniques for ascribing different forms of authority.

Is Wikipedia a cesspool of antisemitism? Don't trust the ADL's answer. The ADL would have us believe Wikipedia is riddled by antisemitism. The reality is more complicated, writes a scholar whom the ADL has cited.

A recent ADL report claimed to find broad, systemic evidence of antisemitism on Wikipedia, prompting two dozen members of Congress to call into question the site's approach to moderating content related to Jews.

Some researchers cited by the ADL say their findings have been misconstrued.

A table listing the 13 research fund proposals under consideration (screenshot of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Start#Alternative_overview_of_the_research_fund_proposals_under_further_consideration )

"Invitation to give feedback to Wikimedia Research Fund 2024-2025 proposals" until May 12 lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/l...
(13 proposals under review, with budgets ranging from $8,571 to $149,976 USD)

Image of various pills, with text: 'Readers use Wikipedia's health content "to learn more", "to improve decision-making" and "for self-advocacy".' (from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2025/April )

In the new edition of our monthly newsletter:
* How readers use Wikipedia health content
* Scholars are generally happy with how their papers are cited on Wikipedia
* Several other papers about references on Wikipedia
and more:
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

Research citations building trust in Wikipedia: Results from a survey of published authors The use of Wikipedia citations in scholarly research has been the topic of much inquiry over the past decade, however little is known regarding perceived Researchers trustworthiness of Wikipedia citations and representation of their work. This cross-publisher study (Taylor & Francis and University of Michigan Press) aimed to investigate author sentiment towards Wikipedia as a source of trusted information. Methods A short survey was distributed to 40,402 authors of papers cited in Wikipedia (n=21,854 surveys sent, n=750 complete responses received). The survey gathered responses from published authors in relation to their views on Wikipedia’s trustworthiness in relation to the citations to their published works. The unique findings of the survey were analysed using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods using Python, Google BigQuery and Looker Studio. Results Overall, authors expressed positive sentiment towards research citation in Wikipedia and researcher engagement practices (mean scores >7/10). Sub-analyses revealed significant differences in sentiment based on publication type (articles vs. books) and discipline (Humanities and Social Sciences vs. Science, Technology, and Medicine), but not access status (open vs. closed access). Conclusions This study provides unique insights into author perceptions of Wikipedia’s trustworthiness. Further research is needed to deepen the understanding of the benefits for researchers and publishers including academic citations in Wikipedia.

Research citations building trust in Wikipedia: Results from a survey of published authors | PLOS One https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0320334

📢📢📢 Second for Contributions!
Join us at the 2nd WikiNLP Workshop on NLP for Wikipedia, co-located with #ACL2025 in Vienna. We welcome both in-person and virtual attendees, and have both archival and non-archival tracks!

🗓️ deadline: April 30
Details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for...

Wiki Workshop 2025 May 21st – 22nd, 2025

Registration is now open for #WikiWorkshop2025!

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect and collaborate with the @wikiresearch.bsky.social community.

📅 May 21-22, 2025
💻 Virtual
🔗 pretix.eu/wikimedia/wi...

Plot showing evidence for a decrease in pageviews for LLM-similar Wikipedia articles (including a figure from Liang Lyu, James Siderius, Hannah Li, Daron Acemoglu, Daniel Huttenlocher, Asuman Ozdaglar, "Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT", CC BY 4.0)

Illustration of the challenges between different stakeholders (regarding Flagged Revisions on Wikipedia) from "Challenges in Restructuring Community-based Moderation", by Chau Tran, Kejsi Take, Kaylea Champion, Benjamin Mako Hill, Rachel Greenstadt, CC BY-SA 4.0

In the March issue of our research newsletter:
* Flagged Revisions: Explaining the disappointing history of a community-requested software feature
* A roundup of several recent papers investigating the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia so far
and more: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

New funding opportunity for Wikimedia-related research! Grants up to $150K available. Apply by April 16th:
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:...

We received 64 submissions for #WikiWorkshop2025 🙌

A huge thank you to the @wikiresearch.bsky.social community for such an amazing engagement. Our reviewers will be diving into them in the coming weeks... stay tuned! 🔍📖

chart "Fraction of OA citations by publication date of citation" (figure 3 from Puyu Yang, Ahad Shoaib, Robert West, Giovanni Colavizza, "Open access improves the dissemination of science: insights from Wikipedia", https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05163-4 , BB BY 4.0)

In the new issue of our monthly newsletter:
▸ What's known about how readers navigate Wikipedia
▸ Italian Wikipedia is the hardest to read
▸ "open access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia" than those behind a paywall
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

WikiNLP workshop flyer inviting contributions for provocations, datasets, and ongoing work on NLP+Wikimedia

The call for papers for the second edition of the #WikiNLP workshop at @aclmeeting.bsky.social is out!

We welcome contributions on #NLProc + Wikimedia, especially on datasets, and ideas to advance its mission.

More details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for...

German Election Trends: The Role of Community Notes on X! by Narges Chinichian*, Hannah Doyal* and Taha Yasseri

Here are some preliminary analyses of X's Community Notes in relation to the German election.
The top 2 most frequently cited sources are X and Wikipedia (among other results).
medium.com/@nargeschini...
@communitynotesbsky.bsky.social @wikiresearch.bsky.social

An endangered species: how LLMs threaten Wikipedia’s sustainability - AI & SOCIETY As a collaboratively edited and open-access knowledge archive, Wikipedia offers a vast dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) applications and models, enhancing data accessibility and acces...

A new article I coauthored with @darthvetter.bsky.social is out today in AI and Society, "An Endangered Species: How LLMs threaten Wikipedia's sustainability" #wikipedia #wikiresearch link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Logo for Wiki Workshop 2025 mentioning it will take place virtually on May 21 and 22, 2025.

📣 The Call for Papers for the 12th edition of Wiki Workshop is out.

Submit your 2-page extended abstract of your research about Wikimedia projects by March 9! All submissions are non-archival (ongoing, completed, already published works are welcome).

More info: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Wo...

A screenshot of the start of the paper "WikiReddit: Tracing Information and Attention Flows Between Online Platforms"

📄 Excited to share a new dataset preprint!
WikiReddit: Tracing Information and Attention Flows Between Online Platforms
A collaboration with @beeeeeers.bsky.social, Viviane Ito, Agustin Orozco, and @ftripodi.bsky.social at @citap.bsky.social .

chart showing average aggregated scores of human evaluation for edit summaries for edits on English Wikipedia. (Figure 4 from Šakota, Marija; Johnson, Isaac; Feng, Guosheng; West, Robert (2024-04-04), Edisum: Summarizing and Explaining Wikipedia Edits at Scale. CC-BY 4.0)

In the latest issue of our newsletter:
▸ GPT-4 is better at writing edit summaries than human Wikipedia editors
and other new research findings
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

"Original Barnstar", by SunirShah, public domain

In the latest issue of our monthly newsletter:
▸ "Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", especially community "superstars" – but editors motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality
And other recent research publications
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

AI-generated illustration of a human writer and a creature with the head and wings of a crow, both sitting and typing on their own laptops, experiencing mild hallucinations

Topics in the newsletter's September issue were:
▸WikiCrow: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors
▸Using Wikipedia's categories and lists to build a knowledge graph separate from Wikidata
and more meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

Ouroboros-Zanaq_00.svg (by Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 4.0)

And ICYMI, our October newsletter:
▸ "Rise of AI-Generated Content": The AI-Wikipedia ouroboros begins to devour itself - or does it?
▸ Using LLMs to improve coverage of underrepresented groups
▸ Feminist critiques of Wikipedia's "be bold" and lack of "dissensus"
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...

picture of several spinach leaves used as logo/titular emoji of "SPINACH" ("SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-WorldQuestions")

In the latest issue of our newsletter on research about Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects:
▸ "SPINACH": LLM-based tool makes Wikidata's data more accessible, translating "challenging real-world questions" to SPARQL queries
and other new publications
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc...