Hello Everyone,
I wanted to take a moment to introduce Diederik van Liere [1]. Diederik
will be working with the Foundation on some research projects to help
the community get a better understanding of editor patterns on
Wikipedia. Below is a note from Diederik which gives some insight into
his research experience and interests. He has done some interesting and
relevant work on online communities, most recently as a post-doc at the
Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. We're excited
to have him as a research consultant, so please join me in welcoming him!
Howie
[1]
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/diederikvanliere
*Diederik van Liere*
My name is Diederik van Liere and I am a research consultant at the Wikimedia Foundation.
I started last week on a project, in collaboration with Howie Fung and Erik Moeller, to
better understand the editor dynamics of the different Wikipedia sites. My research
interests are around the broad theme of community management and community effectiveness
and in particular how online tools can help in that regard. I have researched open source
communities such as Firefox and Thunderbird in my previous position at the Rotman School
of Management. I enjoy all phases of quantitative research: writing custom data parsers,
parallelizing 'big data' challenges, and building statistical models to gain more
detailed answers to research questions. I have an interest in developing tools that will
allow for parallelized / distributed data processing in order to shorten processing time
and get answers back to the community faster.
I am excited to be part of this community because I strongly identify with Wikimedia's
mission of making knowledge globally accessible and I am looking forward to the on- and
offline collaborations with you. In the mean time, you will see the firsts posts about the
Editor Dynamics project appearing on this mailing list and (soon) the Strategy Wiki. Feel
free to drop me an email (dvanliere at gmail dot com) whenever you have a question about
these topics.