I just realized that I missed the reply-all on the message below when I sent it yesterday.  I'm re-sending to the list.  

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Hey folks,

I had some time to try to address a couple of questions.  

Pine asked:
Does Analytics have any ideas to contribute to how to stabilize and increase the population of active editors and to improve editor gender diversity?


Right now, there is a product team at the WMF[1] that is focused on developing new features to help new editors.   We post research results describing our recent work on meta[2].  Right now, we're trying to solve general problems that newcomers face.  For example, figuring out how to find simple & productive tasks to perform.  See [3].

As far as new ideas, I personally have a ton that I'd love to talk about.  It would probably be better to start a new thread or even a set of wiki pages on such strategies.  Right now, I'm pursuing an old IEG to restructure mentorship[4] in enwiki and maintaining a tool for helping wiki mentors find promising newcomers in need of help[5] besides my work with the Growth team discussed above.

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Growth
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians
3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted
4. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Reimagining_Mentorship_on_Wikipedia
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Snuggle

Gerard asked:
[...] can you please tell us to what extend the other languages are studied at all?


I'm not sure at which scope to answer this question.  There's a lot of external research that studies trends cross-language (e.g. [1] and [2]).  WikiStats provides summary statistics and timeseries for all Wikimedia Projects[3].  We also perform studies cross-wiki internally.  For example, see my recently presented study of article creation trends across the top 10 Wikipedias[4].  Now, if you're trying to make a point about how we ought to extend our studies to non-English Wikipedia wiki projects more, you'll find us in agreement.  In my observation, there are two main reasons that we don't do more in non-English wikis.  
(1) data-access: until recently, we didn't have the infrastructure to run complex queries on non-English wikis without taking the Toolserver down.  Our relative ease in analyzing English Wikipedia made it a great space for developing and testing hypotheses.  
(2) ethnography: as English is our common language at the WMF and many of us are natives of the English Wikipedia, we understand that community better.  I personally find it easier to develop and vet metrics.  In order for me to effectively extend me analysis to non-English wikis, I need collaborators from those wikis help me understand the community and vet my metrics.  In the past, I have collaborated with Henrique Andrade to look at the Portuguese Wikipedia.  I'm interested in working with others.  

1. http://xxx.tau.ac.il/pdf/1312.0976.pdf
2. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~bhecht/publications/bhecht_CommAndTech2009.pdf
3. http://stats.wikimedia.org/
4. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_article_creation


On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 5:21 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak <dariusz.jemielniak@fulbrightmail.org> wrote:
hi there,

sounds cool! CSCW 2015 is also an interesting idea, I'd love to contribute to.

best,

dj


On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:25 AM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
All,

these are highlights from a session the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research & Data team hosted at CSCW ’14 in Baltimore. The audience was a group of researchers either working on Wikipedia/Wikimedia-related research projects or interested in learning about opportunities to collaborate with the Foundation.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions/comments.

Contact



Mailing list: wiki-research-l (mailing list)


Resources

We gave a short overview of existing resources of potential interest to Wikipedia/Wikimedia researchers:

Subject recruitment. Aaron and Dario have managed a process for documenting and vetting subject recruitment occurring on Wikimedia projects.  This process was set in place to help resolve the tension between researchers’ need to recruit subjects and editors’ desire to not be bothered.  The process involves a public discussion and mentorship in order to ensure that proposed studies that affect editors are well documented, are addressing original questions and do not result in unnecessary disruption of wiki work. This is a service we’ve been providing on a volunteer basis as members of the Research Committee, it’s meant to offer support to researchers but doesn’t eliminate the risk that an account used for recruitment purposes might be blocked by an administrator.

IRBs and minors. One of the issues that we discussed is dealing with IRB & other ethics boards’ requirements when studies may result in interaction with minors.  Aaron <ahalfaker@wikimedia.org> is willing to discuss the issue with researchers and university staff upon request.  

Annual survey modules. Interest was expressed in exploring strategies for expanding the annual editor/reader survey with new questions contributed by researchers. At this point (March 2014) we cannot commit to any such project, but in general there is potential for cooperations between WMF and academic researchers in this area. Interested parties should contact Tilman Bayer (tbayer at wikimedia dot org) who has been conducting the last WMF editor survey and can provide information about these surveys (methodology, results, available data etc.) and their calendar.


WikiResearch Workshop at CSCW 2015. We discussed planning a workshop for CSCW next year. Anyone who is interested in collaborating, please contact us.  Details are TBD, but our general goals include:
  • increase awareness of the public data resources that are available
  • highlight research areas that are ripe for investigation, esp. where WMF could benefit from the results
  • get a better sense of what kind of data resources (and/or what data formats) researchers would like to have
  • brainstorm a (lightweight, ethical, practical) model for partnership between WMF and academic research orgs that want access to certain non-public data

Wiki Research Hackathons. On Nov. 9th, 2013, we held our first global research hackathon (announcement).  We had universities and other local meetups from around the world connect via Google Hangout to share ideas, data and presentations geared toward datasets, code and other resources.  We’ll be planning another hackathon in the coming months.  You can help by hosting or attending your own local event.  Please contact us if you’re interested.

Public listing on WMF’s strategic research questions. We discussed the potential for the Wikimedia Foundation to list out key areas of research that we are interested in.  This is something we are keenly interested in and you should expect to hear from us soon through wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch.

Tweet @WikiResearch. We maintain a relatively high-visibility twitter account from which we tweet about new research,  data, and other initiatives.  If you tweet about your own wiki-related work @WikiResearch, we will retweet it so long as it’s relevant. We will also experiment with the use of this Twitter handle to increase the visibility of libraries and analytics tools to support Wikipedia research.

Internships/grad student residencies. We talked briefly about research collaborations, internships and other forms of work opportunities at WMF.  We’re actively exploring possibilities and will broadcast details through wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch when we know more.  

We’re hiring. We are looking to expand the research team at WMF, if you are interested in working with us keep an eye on wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch for job openings or contact us off-list.

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________________________
Dariusz Jemielniak, Ph.D.
associate professor of management
chair of International Management
head of the Center for Research on Organizations and Workplaces (CROW)
Kozminski University
http://www.crow.kozminski.edu.pl