Play Wikipedia Trivia! (and help us crowdsource questions!)
August, 2022
This year, Wikimania’s theme is “Wikimania: The Festival Edition!” so CAT Lab wanted to celebrate by hosting a trivia session! We’ll be putting to the test what Wikipedians know (and think they know) by asking questions derived from research that’s been conducted on Wikipedia. In a series of team rounds styled after the game “two truths and a lie,” teams will be asked to guess which of three statements are unknowns, and which two are knowns. Come test your knowledge on August 14 at 09:40am UTC!
If you haven’t signed up yet, Wikimania registration is free.
What do you wish Wikipedians Know? Contribute Questions to the Quiz, and to Science
We’d like this to be an opportunity for Wikimedia community members and academic researchers to highlight the work you have done on Wiki Projects, get people excited about questions you’re asking, generate buzz about projects you’re working on, and share research that has inspired you.
Feel free to be selfish! Hype your work, promote your upcoming projects, and share your burning questions! Any references to your own work will be cited and linked so participants can learn more. We’ll also credit you for examples you share.
If you have some examples to share, please complete this Google Form by August 9th, 2022.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
Good questions must:
- Link back to things that are knowable in some way
- Be a statement of fact, no more than three sentences (but preferably one to two).
- Avoid jargon that would be unfamiliar to English language learners.
- Avoid details, idioms, turns of phrase that are highly culturally specific (for example US pop culture or phrases like “birds of a feather”)
- Knowns need a citation (citations should follow Wikipedia citation practices)
- Unknowns need some justification, so the organizers can assess them. Citations of a related work is preferred
Good questions might:
- Be funny or interesting
- Take advantage of people’s over-confidence (or under-confidence)
A few examples:
Knowns:
Receiving thanks from editors on multiple language Wikipedias leads volunteers to express more thanks to other Wikipedians as well.
Wikipedia contributors who spend more time removing vandalism also report spending more time mentoring newcomers, across multiple language Wikipedias
Unknowns
Despite popular belief in the idea of “Godwin’s Law,” Wikipedia talk pages that are longer are no more likely to refer to Hitler or Nazis than discussions that are shorter.
- Justification: this study has been done on Reddit, but not Wikipedia (https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/HSMHX9RRVAC73DBWM9WT/full)
Adding an image to Wikipedia biography will increase the views that the article receives.
- Researchers have studied the gender balance of biography images by analyzing historical data, but it would take an experiment to test this idea (https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/news/call-action-ensure-fairer-gender-representation-wikipedia)