Hi all,
Summary: I have made changes to the introduction description of this
mailing list. This includes changes to what this mailing list is used
for (reflecting more closely the reality of how it's been used for the
past couple of years), more expanded information about other lists
that you may want to be aware of, the mailing list norms, and the
introduction of topics and tags. You can review the updated
description at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
. As a participant of this mailing list, you are responsible to know
the description of the mailing list and I kindly ask you to review it.
Thanks! :)
Long version:
==Who am I?==
I'm one of the admins of this list (and head of Research at Wikimedia
Foundation).
==Why the change?==
On a personal level: I want to be able to communicate with the
research community around Wikimedia projects more often, I don't want
to create a new list for my communications, and I saw the note about
the limits on the frequency of posts in the old description of this
list as something that "kept me out". Inspired by this need, I had a
more comprehensive look at the full description.
The previous version of the description [1] had a few areas to improve
based on the current needs and realities of this list. I name a couple
of them below:
* We had a note about the frequency of emails to this list to be kept
low. With the stack of technologies available to us today, we can
relax this condition and ask for people to use tags/topics in the
subject of their emails to allow for more emails to come to the list.
* The note on who can post to this list could be improved. It read
"only people who are actively involved in research on Wikimedia
projects should post to this list" while my understanding is that on
this list we want to welcome research related questions from those who
are not actively involved in research, too. For example, community
organizers should feel welcome to ask research-related questions on
this list.
==What process did I follow for this change?==
I wrote my proposed changes in an etherpad and sent it to 10 people.
These folks include the two other admins of this list, a couple of
other Research folks from WMF, a few folks from the Wikimedia Research
community, and two editors from the community who are active in the
research space. I heard back from 3 of these folks with thumbs up and
areas for improvement. I incorporated all the suggestions I received.
==What if you have suggestions for improvements?==
Sure. Bring them up on this thread or privately. Please note that I
will be in Wikidata Conference [2] and after that in our annual
Research Offsite and may not be able to respond to you until
2019-11-01.
==Where can I see the updated description?==
Please go to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
to review it.
Thanks,
Leila
[1] Read the previous version of the description below:
The purpose of this mailing list is to discuss scientific research
into the content and the communities of the Wikimedia projects:
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews,
Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki.
Research into the technology of Wikimedia, MediaWiki, should primarily
be discussed on <a
href="http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l">wikitech-l</A>
instead. For content or community research projects with a strong
technological component, cross-posting to both lists may be advisable.
Please note that only people who are actively involved in research on
Wikimedia projects should post to this list. Typical on-topic posts
include:
<UL><LI>announcement of a new research project
<LI>discussions of methodology
<LI>questions and answers about related projects
</UL>
Mailing list traffic should be kept at a reasonably low level. The
list is softly moderated, and individuals posting off-topic material
repeatedly may be removed.
This list is not directly associated with the <a
href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Network">Wikimedia
Research Network</A>, though members of the Network are welcome to
post here if they are involved in research projects relating to
content or community. Internal Wikimedia matters, discussions of new
projects and similar threads should be kept off the list.
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2019
--
Leila Zia
Principal Research Scientist, Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation