Disclosure: Beginning in 2015, I am working for the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society (UNU-CS). I edit related articles with my free time following the practices to avoid potential conflict of interests (i.e. using mainly secondary sources, full disclosure, etc.).

I am a user of Wikipedia (zh and en). My reasearch is on the comparative study of Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike. Thus, my contribution to Wikipedia projects is mostly limited or indirect.

• My contribution to Wikicommons
• My latest contributions in zh Wikipedia
• My submitted report on Wikisym 2011 and visit to Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, on a scholarship provided by Wikimedia UK

I use both conventional social scientific methods and new webometric methods (geo-linguistic analysis) to compare the following aspects of Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia

1. their editorial environment and organizations
2. their produced content and citations
3. their reception (including visibility) by users across major Chinese-speaking regions, including mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Some published and announced papers could be found in the following:

• My personal CV lists some research outcome
• My academic blog
• My personal mini-blog

If you have any questions, please email me with this email address

It is shown that online encyclopedia websites perform the best, and search engine variants (different combinations of search engine providers and locale interface) determines which online encyclopedia website pops up more often. Visualized visibility scores, The larger one dot (for a website) is, the higher of the visibility score, and the wider one arrow is, the larger contribution by a specific search engine variant

Depending on different types of keywords, some websites may perform better.

• 2011 OX

• 2012 HK (多了Fortune 500的搜尋關鍵字)

The accumulative visbility scores curves show that a small number of websites enjoy higher share of the total visibility scores.

The 2012HK dataset seems to suggest, in contrast to the 2011OX dataset, that the visbility-rich websites gets richer。

The book chapter of "Wikipedia as Cultural Reference" in Richard A. Rogers' book "Digital Methods"^[1] can be read as an example of the "digital methods" applied to Wikipedia, or a contribution to the emerging literature on cross-language-version or cross-cultural comparison of the same or similar encyclopedia articles in global Wikipedia projects. Not to be confused with "big methods", "virtual methods", etc.^[2], the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a school of Internet researchers at University of Amsterdam lead by Rogers to 'create a platform to display the tools and methods to perform research that, also, can take advantage of "web epistemology"'^[3]. Currently the DMI has built some basic Wikipedia research tools^[4] that help social scientists to analyze cross-lingual images, anonymous edits, table of contents, etc. Thus, as part of Rogers' research agenda in advocating the "digital methods", the Wikipedia projects become both a data set and analytical devices that can be repurposed for social research: "as a cultural reference, a vigilant community, a scandal machine and a controversy diagnostic machine"^[5].

Self-defined as "cultural research with Wikipedia", this chapter compared the Srebrenica Articles (The Fall of Srebrenica, the Srebrenica Massacre, and the Srebrenica Genocide) across six language versions: Dutch, English, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Serbo-Croatian. Using a various kinds of datasets, ranging from creation dates, edits by interlanguage article editors and top ten editors, the numbers of victims, table of contents, referenced websites and images used, the findings show that the principle of neutral point of view does not automatically make Wikipedia articles universal (or at least similar) across language versions. The differences, especially those are specific to the Wiki medium, can be used for cultural analysis on the selected topics. The content outcome is found to reflect the dynamics between the power editors in defending their sources and content using Wikipedia policies. Among these "umbrella articles", the English version is a highly contested article among many interlanguage editors, and the Serbo-Croatian version is much softened and unifying with very few editors.

Adopting and extending the digital methods, two groups of participants at the DMI summer school 2013 examined the cross-language-version differences on two topics: art and menstruation. The first "Cross Lingual Art Spaces on Wikipedia" project (by Sangeet Kumar, Garance Coggins, Sarah Mc Monagle, Stephan Schlögl, Han-Teng Liao, Michael Stevenson, Federica Bardelli, Anat Ben-David)^[6] sought to find the universal and specific articulations of the concept of art through (1) images and (2) concepts (i.e. strongly related articles), producing an image network visualization for 154 language versions and a concept network visualization for selected eight language versions. A Wikidata scraping tool was developed to identify different names for the same content for the process called "concept reference disambiguation". The second "Menstruation Across Cultures Online" project (by Astrid Bigoni, Loes Bogers, Zuzana Karascakova, Emily Stacey and Sarah Mc Monagle)^[7] looked at the cultural differences of Wikipedia images and Google autocomplete suggestions to find associated images and search queries. In addition, the English version of Menstruation article is also compared with other English-language sources such as urban dictionary and twitter, producing an interesting cross-platform comparative tag clouds. While not full research articles, the research outcomes of the two projects nonetheless demonstrated the potential directions for cross-cultural and cross-platform comparison, when Wikipedia projects are compared among themselves or along with other online platforms that contain user-generated content and/or activities.