The Most Important Laboratory for Social Scientific and Computing Research in History

Abstract

Wikipedia's founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history, yet Wikipedia has had an enormous effect on academic research. Twenty years ago, Wikipedia's founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history. And yet that is exactly what has happened. Wikipedia and its sister projects have launched a thriving scholarly literature. How thriving? Results from Google Scholar suggest that over six thousand scholarly publications mention Wikipedia in their title and over 1.7 million mention it somewhere in their text. For comparison, the phrase "Catholic church"-an organization with a nearly two-thousand-year head startreturns about the same number of mentions in publication titles. In under twenty years, Wikipedia has become one of the most heavily studied organizations of any kind. To the extent that Wikipedia research is a field of study, what major areas of investigation have been pursued in the field so far? What are the big discoveries? The most striking gaps? This essay addresses these questions and considers some of the most important directions Wikipedia research might take in the future. The State of Wikimedia Research In 2008, Mako Hill was about to start his first year as a social science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he hoped to study, among other things, organizational processes that had driven Wikipedia's success. Mako felt it would behoove him to become better connected to the recent academic scholarship on Wikipedia. He was also looking for a

Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership

“…Primarily, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can share in. At the same time, it plays a crucial role in enabling research as "the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history" [47]. Our work on the curiosity of Wikipedia's readership constitutes an example of how this laboratory contributes to addressing current challenges in human behaviour research-not only by increasing ecological validity or diversifying representation empirically [105] but also by advancing theories of human behaviour [106].…”

“…As a result, Wikipedia is not only an encyclopedia that anyone can share in but also a record of an epochal shift in how humans digitally collect, organize, store, and disseminate information. In addition, Wikipedia has produced a digital environment which is one of the most important laboratories for social scientific research in history [47].…”

Un canon literario universal basado en datos enciclopédicos multilingües: propuesta de un método de medición de obras literarias usando datos cuantitativos obtenidos de Wikidata y Wikipedia

“…Los estudios sobre cobertura temática en Wikipedia han girado sobre diversos campos, como el de la ciencia, las biografías, patrimonio cultural, cultura de masas o la actualidad social (Hill y Shaw, 2020;Reznik y Shatalov, 2016;Minguillón y otros, 2017). Sin embargo, no existe una buena y amplia panorámica de la participación de Wikipedia en el conocimiento de las obras literarias o de las obras impresas.…”