Research:Analyzing Accessibility of Wikipedia Projects Around the World
In recent years, Wikipedia has faced censorship by governments around the world. In some cases, it is difficult to identify censorship without direct reports from users within a country.
To understand these challenges, the Wikimedia Foundation is collaborating on a censorship study with researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The study will attempt to answer the following question: how can we use software to detect government censorship by monitoring access, using server- and client-side information, to Wikimedia Sites.
Methods
editStudy Question: How can we use software to detect government censorship by monitoring access, using server- and client-side information, to Wikimedia Sites.
Methodology: The study will result in the creation of two separate software systems to automatically collect and analyze data from two perspectives: the perspective of the web server and the perspective of the web client.
For the server component, the open-source software package will use time-series analysis to analyze Wikimedia log traffic to identify possible instances of past censorship as well automatically identify instances of potential censorship in the future.
For the client component, the software will be a web-accessibility API that can return various performance metrics and status of accessing various Wikimedia Sites from countries around the world.