We are organizing an event for Research and Wikimedia to exchange about research done in the field and for researchers and Wikimedia community members to work together on new ideas. The idea derived from the fact that many researchers reusing Wikipedia, Wikidata and their sister projects often are not yet integrated with the community. This makes their work a lot more difficult than necessary. At the same time, many research projects are useful for the community, but not yet integrated into Wikipedia and co. We want to change this and facilitate the exchange between researchers and Wikimedia community members in an event, where we bring people interested in similar topics together. If you are either doing research in the Wikipedia space or are a community member of one of the Wikimedia projects, please come by on the 8th of February. More details below.

Please spread the event invitation in your communities!

Best,

Lucie

Description
We are organizing an event for Wikimedians and researchers to exchange! Come along and learn more about research happening around Wikimedia and what Wikimedians can teach you about the different Wikimedia projects!
A large part of the computer science research community is exploring Wikipedia, Wikidata and their sister projects. In the fields of natural language processing (NLP) as well as semantic web, Wikipedia and Wikidata are often used as a fundamental part of the research world. At the same time, the community of Wikidata and Wikipedia could make use of a variety of tools developed by researchers. However, currently, the gap between things explored in research and actual applications in Wikidata and Wikipedia needs bridging. Therefore, we want to build a community of Wikidata community members and research to exchange needs, existing tools, open challenges and research question to foster an environment, where both communities can benefit from the exchange.
The ideal is to have all the different approaches and commonalities under one umbrella to foster exchange and support of different research communities and their approaches.
OpenSym and the WikiWorkshop are already doing that for the people submitting to and attending computer science research conferences. But without the exchange with the community, there is a lack of communication, creating silos of missing exchange.

The Goal is
to connect the researcher and the Wikimedia community to enable an exchange that could ultimately lead to the research projects being implemented as tools for Wikipedia. And vice-versa: More research projects build on community needs.

We invite
Researchers
Anyone who does or is planning to do research on or around Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, Wikidata and others.
Wikimedians
Anyone in the community, who is interested in improving the research happening around Wikimedia - you don’t need any experience in research. Wikipedia editor, Wikidata data magician, whatever you do in Wikimedia projects, your feedback will be highly valuable.

What we need from you
We would ask all researchers to bring an A2/A3 poster about what they are doing in Wikimedia that we can put up so that we can create an easy way to exchange on different projects. If you don’t have a project yet, don’t worry- just bring a poster with topics you find interesting, and you might be able to meet other researchers already working in your field of interest. (If you struggle with printing the poster beforehand, please reach out to us a few days in advance.)

Event
We will spend a day exchanging on recent challenges around Wikimedia. Besides the posters, we aim to form working groups for the afternoon to work on topics of shared interest and possibly propose a project of common interest.
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