[Moving the WMF internal lists to Bcc. Adding wiki-research-l, the
public mailing list for research related questions.]
Hi Ritvik,
Thank you for reaching out to us and your interest to do research with
the Wikimedia projects' data. I'm particularly excited to read that
you are already thinking about giving back to the commons by data,
knowledge, and insights. We love that. :)
Regarding the specific data that you wrote about:
* Our team, Research, is responsible for setting up Formal
Collaborations that allow the type of research that you mention in
your email. At this time, we are only able to prioritize and initiate
formal collaborations that are in-line with our annual plan
commitments and I expect that to stay the same in the coming 8 months.
I'm sorry that we can't explore together a formal collaboration at
this point.
* However, thanks to the nudges by some folks from the research
community and this list, we took steps to find a pathway to share some
of Wikipedia's COVID-19 related data with the research community.
While the decision about what to publish is not finalized, I do expect
to see a geographical dimension associated with pageviews as part of
the release (the granularity of which is to be determined).
You can read more about the details of the data that we are currently
keeping at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_retention_guidelines#Exceptions_to_the…
.
I am sorry that we cannot have a fast turnaround for your request. I
do believe, however, that by reserving more time to work on the
question of how to release the data publicly, we can unlock more
research and also provide a more equitable path for this highly
important dataset and many key research questions that can be answered
with it.
Best,
Leila
--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 7:34 AM Ramakrishnan, Ritvik
<ritvik.ramakrishnan(a)gatech.edu> wrote:
Good Morning,
Hope all is going well! My name is Ritvik Ramakrishnan and I am a Research Assistant at
Harvard University. I have CC’d a Postdoctoral Researcher from Harvard, Dr. Tao Hu, in
this email.
Currently, we are looking at Wikipedia view counts to analyze the trends between that and
COVID-19 growth in the United States. However, the Wikipedia view counts available using
the Wikimedia Rest API Documentation made it difficult for us to geolocate and filter it
to just the United States. The view count numbers we have aren’t confined to a location.
Because of this, after talking to Italy researchers who had conducted a similar study for
the Zika Virus using Wikipedia data confined to the United States, they suggested we reach
out to Wikimedia Foundation to establish a non-disclosure agreement as part of your formal
collaboration policy.
Since we want to be able to look at view counts per day by location, in return we can
provide cutting-edge data and information that your foundation can possibly release the
data we used for our study once we are accepted for publication.
Let me know what next steps we can take in order to proceed. Thank you!
Warm Regards,
Ritvik Ramakrishnan
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