Wikipedia captures complex online social interactions among its over 13 million users and has managed to create free online encyclopedias with over 10,000 articles in nearly 100 languages (list of wikipedias). Yet, analysis of geo-tagged articles reveals that large knowledge gaps remain. Contributions from new Internet users in underrepresented regions are key to expanding the coverage and raising the quality of Wikipedia.
As the Wikipedia user community has grown, it has developed norms and expectations about how users should contribute. These norms and practices may at times be opaque and intimidating to new users. These issues are compounded for users who are contributing in a foreign language.
This project brings together research fellows and doctoral candidates at the Oxford Internet Institute aiming to shed light on the incorporation of new users and information into the Wikipedia community. Current research focuses on how new users are perceived, represented, and incorporated into the community, and how, and to what extent, knowledge is shared between various language editions.
Former DPhil Student
Han-Teng Liao is a student of various disciplines whose research aims to reconsider the role of keywords (sociolinguistics) and hyperlinks (webometrics) in shaping groups (governance) as bearers of ideas (political communications).
Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Bernie Hogan examines how to capture, represent and think about social networks, especially personal social networks. His work focuses on the role of design in social media, network capture techniques and theories of relationships.
Professor of Internet Geography
Mark Graham is an economic geographer. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. He is the author, most recently, of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and Turing Fellow. He develops and applies computer science techniques to the social sciences focusing on increasing equitable access to quality information.
Former DPhil Student
Heather Ford is a DPhil alumna who studies how Wikipedians write history as it happens. Her research covers online collaboration, conflict, historiography, alternative media, the Arab Spring and intellectual property rights.
With Professor Bernie Hogan
With Dr Martin Dittus
Wikimania 2018, the annual global gathering of the Wikipedia community, took place in Cape Town in July. The keynote speaker on the first day was OII digital geographer Dr Martin Dittus, who presented new work produced with Professor Mark Graham.
With Dr Heather Ford
Presentation on Heather Ford's Wikipedia research, on the occasion of Wikipedia's 15th Birthday.
3 November 2020
18 September 2020
30 July 2018
14 June 2017
Deutsche Welle, 13 January 2021
Two decades on from its founding, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into one of the most popular open-source websites.
Inverse, 29 June 2020
"We can see through Wikipedia the evolution of our understanding of this disease.”
BBC World Service, 12 March 2017
Dr Taha Yasseri discusses his research into how software robots that are designed to make articles on Wikipedia better often end up having online fights lasting years over changes in content.
BBC News, 10 March 2017
Dr Taha Yasseri and his colleagues at the OII have been looking at by studying the behaviour of bots that maintain pages on Wikipedia. It turns out that sometimes they disagree over edits.
