WikiProject

A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is the organization of a group of participants in a wiki established in order to achieve specific editing goals, or to achieve goals relating to a specific field of knowledge. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. Unrelated wikis have also used the term, for example OpenStreetMap.[1] During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease.[2] Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by Smithsonian Magazine for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000".[3]

On Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For example, in 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration announced that it had entered into a partnership with Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, "to support sharing relevant Cochrane Evidence in Wikipedia’s health articles and to develop strategies to keep Wikipedia’s health-related content up to date, unbiased, and of high quality."[4]

Wikipedia has thousands of WikiProjects, primarily divided between specific topical areas and performing specific maintenance tasks.[5][6] One task commonly performed by topical WikiProjects in Wikipedia is the assessment of the quality of articles that fall within that topic area.[7] In Wikipedia and sister projects, WikiProject pages are located in project space,[5] and the meta information regarding the association between the article and the WikiProject is usually included on the talk page of the article.[7] WikiProjects provide an additional avenue for engagement between editors with similar interests, and have thereby been found to increase the productivity of such editors.[8] In order to spur participation and concentrate effectiveness, WikiProjects in Wikipedia may engage in activities like having a "collaboration of the week",[9] or designating one article to be improved to the point of achieving "featured" status.[10] The WikiProject Council is a group of editors that assists with the development of active WikiProjects, and acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration.

A 2008 academic study of Wikipedia concluded that participation in WikiProjects substantially improved the chances of an editor becoming an administrator, finding that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits,[11] and concluding:

Merely performing a lot of production work is insufficient for "promotion" in Wikipedia. Candidates’ article edits were weak predictors of success. They also have to demonstrate more managerial behavior. Diverse experience and contributions to the development of policies and WikiProjects were stronger predictors of RfA success. This is consistent with the findings that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy[12] and that coordination work has increased substantially.[13][14] [...] Participation in Wikipedia policy and WikiProjects was not predictive of adminship prior to 2006, suggesting the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination.

WikiProjects and assessments of article importance and quality

The English Wikipedia currently has over 2,000 WikiProjects, with varying degrees of activity.[15][16]

In 2007 the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles.[17] Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, about 7000 (0.16%) are a featured article or a featured list. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia.[18][19]

The articles can also be rated for importance by WikiProjects. Currently, there are 5 importance categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/unsure level. For a particular article, different WikiProjects may assign different importance levels.

The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table and bar-chart.

Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors.[20] A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.[21]

All rated articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low ??? Total
FA 1,319 2,043 2,000 1,353 207 6,922
FL 150 569 630 564 114 2,027
A 267 558 738 457 102 2,122
GA 2,487 5,595 11,145 12,830 1,939 33,996
B 13,352 25,660 40,209 36,878 16,574 132,673
C 12,640 38,248 89,366 139,978 60,302 340,534
Start 17,989 83,053 346,309 1,039,324 359,028 1,845,703
Stub 4,309 31,895 248,266 2,237,413 878,497 3,400,380
List 3,729 13,554 41,049 123,924 75,309 257,565
Assessed 56,242 201,175 779,712 3,592,721 1,392,072 6,021,922
Unassessed 123 530 1,751 16,197 470,277 488,878
Total 56,365 201,705 781,463 3,608,918 1,862,349 6,510,800
500,000
1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
2,500,000
3,000,000
Top
High
Medium
Low
???
  •   Featured articles
  •   Featured lists
  •   A-class articles
  •   Good articles
  •   B-class articles
  •   C-class articles
  •   Start-class articles
  •   Stub articles
  •   Lists
  •   Unassessed articles and lists

WikiProject Medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic

CBS News described the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in making Wikipedia a source of medical information relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that a project member "edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia", but also providing the caveat that "even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages".[2]

References
  1. "Mapping projects". OpenStreetMap. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
  2. Laudato, Anthony (May 24, 2020). "The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information". CBS News.
  3. Daley, Jason (March 15, 2016). "How a College Student Led the WikiProject Women Scientists". Smithsonian Magazine.
  4. "Improving the quality of Wikipedia articles using Cochrane evidence". Cochrane. Retrieved November 19, 2019.
  5. Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it (2008), p. 213.
  6. Broughton, John (2008). Wikipedia – The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media. pp. 165–175.
  7. Huijing Deng, Bernadetta Tarigan, Mihai Grigore, Juliana Sutanto, "Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis", HCI in Business: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9191 (July 21, 2015), p. 64-75.
  8. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 207, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  9. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 38, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  10. Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, Building Successful Online Communities (2012), p. 85, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine".
  11. Burke, Moira; Kraut, Robert (2008). "Taking up the mop". Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 3441. doi:10.1145/1358628.1358871. ISBN 978-1-60558-012-8.
  12. Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy". Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '08. p. 1101. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. ISBN 9781605580111.
  13. Kittur, Aniket; Suh, Bongwon; Pendleton, Bryan A.; and Chi, Ed H. (2007). "He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 453–462. doi:10.1145/1240624.1240698. ISBN 978-1-59593-593-9.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. Viegas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin; Kriss, Jesse; van Ham, Frank (2007). "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia". 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: 575–582. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.210.1057. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2007.511.
  15. Wikipedia:Wikiprojects
  16. Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProjects by changes
  17. Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment
  18. "Comparing featured article groups and revision patterns correlations in Wikipedia". First Monday. Retrieved July 13, 2010.
  19. Fernanda B. Viégas; Martin Wattenberg & Matthew M. McKeon (July 22, 2007). "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" (PDF). Visual Communication Lab, IBM Research. Retrieved October 30, 2007. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. Poderi, Giacomo, Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles, Master thesis, University of Maastricht, October 2008.
  21. Lindsey, David (April 5, 2010). "Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's featured articles". First Monday. 15 (4). Retrieved January 29, 2017.
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