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[jobs] 2 job postings: postdoctoral researcher & principal research scientist
by Pine W 10 Feb '26

10 Feb '26

Hello, Happy second week of February. This email describes two job postings that may interest you or your colleagues. Earlier emails were sent to Wiki-research-l <https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wiki-research-l.lists.wikimedia…> regarding these positions; please disregard the this email if you already saw the info via Research-l. I'm consolidating info from both posts. Position 1, posted at https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_6122/jobs_fellowships_1910/postdoctoral…, is for a *postdoctoral researcher*. Quoting from the posting: “Applications are invited from candidates *who have, or will soon obtain*, a PhD in demography, sociology, epidemiology, medicine, health economics, biostatistics, public health, or a related field. "The successful candidate is expected to work within one or more of the following areas: 1. *Disease Presence and Disease Impact* 1. Has disease presence become more or less predictive of disease impact? 2. How do the timing and patterns of disease accumulation shape the onset of disease impact and individual health trajectories, including pathways to death? 2. *Diffusion of Medical Progress in Populations* 1. How does medical progress shape health inequalities within populations? 2. How are changes in population health linked to how medical progress is distributed within and across populations, for example through in- and outpatient care? 3. *Population Resilience and Vulnerability* 1. How can population resilience and vulnerability be measured? 2. Does medical progress make populations more or less vulnerable?” Position 2 is for a *principal research scientist*. The job posting is at https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/7597104. Quoting Leila (who is CC'd on this email): “Please note that if you have applied for the research scientist position which was shared < https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia…> in December 2025, you are automatically considered for this new position and there is no need to apply again. We will reach out to you if we need additional information from you.” Quoting from the job description: “We are hiring a Principal Research Scientist to join the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research team <https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html> to support the Wikimedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation in the continued evolution of Wikimedia projects and their decentralized governance model, ensuring that the projects become multigenerational <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Multigenerational>. "Here are some things we’ve worked on that might give you a better sense of the scope of the work you will be accountable for and part of: - Understanding Wikipedia administrator recruitment, retention, and attrition (Learn more <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Administrator_Recruitmen…>) - A set of recommendations for conducting NPOV research on Wikipedia (Learn more <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Guidance_for_NPOV_Research_on_Wiki…>) - Developing a meta-method for analyzing the state of NPOV on Wikipedia (Learn more <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:A_meta-method_for_analyzing_NPOV_o…>) "You can learn more about what the team has done in the past six months by reading our biannual report <https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html>. "Please note: this is a fully remote role that requires working with senior leadership and stakeholders across the organization and the research community in different timezones. It is expected that the Principal Research Scientist be available for critical meetings and synchronous work between 15:00 to 19:00 UTC. It is further expected that the candidate is open to traveling up to four times per year.” Leila posted some additional information on the Research mailing list. The thread is viewable at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia… <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia…> Good luck to any applicants. (Disclaimer: I'm not an employee of either of the hiring organizations. Please direct any questions to the applicable organization.) Regards, Pine🌲

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Druid cluster maintenance tomorrow - 2025-01-21 @10:30 UTC
by Ben Tullis 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Hello, We are planning to upgrade our Druid <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Systems/Druid> cluster for analytics tomorrow morning (Wednesday 21st Jan 2026) at around 10:30 UTC. The work is being tracked in: T278056 Upgrade Druid to version 26.0.0 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T278056> We expect the work to take around 1 hour, during which there will be disruption to Turnilo <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Systems/Turnilo> and any Superset <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Systems/Superset> dashboards that read from Druid. Please let us know if this will be highly inconvenient for you, for any reason. If this should be the case, then we can look to defer and re-schedule the upgrade. If you have any queries or comments, please do get in touch. Kind regards, Ben -- *Ben Tullis*(he/him) Staff Site Reliability Engineer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

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[Wikimedia Research Showcase] Readers and Readership Research - September 24 at 16:30 UTC
by Kinneret Gordon 24 Sep '25

24 Sep '25

Hi everyone, The September 2025 Research Showcase will be live-streamed next Wednesday, September 24, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1758731400>. Our theme this month is *Readers and Readership Research*. *We invite you to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/vqIp3CSgAVA <https://www.youtube.com/live/vqIp3CSgAVA>.* As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. This month, we will have one presentation featuring several speakers: Key learnings from a decade of readers research and what’s ahead By *WMF Research Team* For over a decade, the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team and its collaborators have studied Wikipedia's readership and readers. In this showcase, we will synthesize the key insights from this body of work, illustrate how these learnings inform our current research, and present recommendations for future research into understanding Wikipedia's readers and readership globally. Looking forward to seeing many of you, Kinneret -- Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> *Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*

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[Wikimedia Research Showcase] Ensuring Content Integrity on Wikipedia - June 18 at 16:30 UTC
by Kinneret Gordon 18 Jun '25

18 Jun '25

Hi everyone, The June 2025 Research Showcase will be live-streamed next Wednesday, June 18, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1750264200>. Our theme this month is *Ensuring Content Integrity on Wikipedia*. *We invite you to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/GgYh6zbrrss <https://www.youtube.com/live/GgYh6zbrrss>.* As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. Our presentations this month: The Differential Effects of Page Protection on Wikipedia Article QualityBy *Manoel Horta Ribeiro (Princeton University)*Wikipedia strives to be an open platform where anyone can contribute, but that openness can sometimes lead to conflicts or coordinated attempts to undermine article quality. To address this, administrators use “page protection"—a tool that restricts who can edit certain pages. But does this help the encyclopedia, or does it do more harm than good? In this talk, I’ll present findings from a large-scale, quasi-experimental study using over a decade of English Wikipedia data. We focus on situations where editors requested page protection and compare the outcomes for articles that were protected versus similar ones that weren’t. Our results show that page protection has mixed effects: it tends to benefit high-quality articles by preventing decline, but it can hinder improvement in lower-quality ones. These insights reveal how protection shapes Wikipedia content and help inform when it’s most appropriate to restrict editing, and when it might be better to leave the page open. Seeing Like an AI: How LLMs Apply (and Misapply) Wikipedia Neutrality Norms By *Joshua Ashkinaze (University of Michigan)*Large language models (LLMs) are trained on broad corpora and then used in communities with specialized norms. Is providing LLMs with community rules enough for models to follow these norms? We evaluate LLMs' capacity to detect (Task 1) and correct (Task 2) biased Wikipedia edits according to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy. LLMs struggled with bias detection, achieving only 64% accuracy on a balanced dataset. Models exhibited contrasting biases (some under- and others over-predicted bias), suggesting distinct priors about neutrality. LLMs performed better at generation, removing 79% of words removed by Wikipedia editors. However, LLMs made additional changes beyond Wikipedia editors' simpler neutralizations, resulting in high-recall but low-precision editing. Interestingly, crowdworkers rated AI rewrites as more neutral (70%) and fluent (61%) than Wikipedia-editor rewrites. Qualitative analysis found LLMs sometimes applied NPOV more comprehensively than Wikipedia editors but often made extraneous non-NPOV-related changes (such as grammar). LLMs may apply rules in ways that resonate with the public but diverge from community experts. While potentially effective for generation, LLMs may reduce editor agency and increase moderation workload (e.g., verifying additions). Even when rules are easy to articulate, having LLMs apply them like community members may still be difficult. Best, Kinneret -- Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> *Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*

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[Wikimedia Research Showcase] Motivation of Wikipedia Editors - April 16 at 16:30 UTC
by Kinneret Gordon 14 Apr '25

14 Apr '25

Hi all, The April 2025 Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, April 16, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1744821000>. Our theme this month is *Motivation of Wikipedia Editors*. *We invite you to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/vl0DpsfnPXY <https://youtube.com/live/vl0DpsfnPXY?feature=share>.* As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. Our presentations this month: Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on WikipediaBy *Yan Chen (University of Michigan)*We conducted a large-scale personalized field experiment to examine how match quality, recognition, and social impact influence domain experts' contributions to Wikipedia. Forty-five percent of the experts expressed willingness to contribute in the baseline condition, while 51% (a 13\% increase over the baseline) expressed interest when they received a signal that an article matched their expertise. However, none of the treatments had a significant effect on actual contributions. Greater actual match quality between a recommended Wikipedia article and an expert's expertise, measured by cosine similarity, an expert's reputation and the Wikipedia article length, were the most important predictors of both contribution length and quality. These findings suggest that match quality between volunteers and tasks is critically important in encouraging contributions to digital public goods, and likely to volunteering in general. Quantitative Analysis of Zambian Wikipedia Contributions: Assessing Awareness, Willingness, Motivation, and the Impact of Gamified Leaderboards and BadgesBy *Lighton Phiri (University of Zambia)*Wikipedia is a widely recognized and valuable source of information, However, it encounters persistent challenges in attracting and retaining active contributors. It is recorded that only 10 people from Zambia contribute and create content on wikipedia in the month of may 2023. While a large number consumes Wikipedia content, there is a noticeably low number of Wikipedians that contribute content on and about Zambia. This paper presents a Facebook plugin, WikiMotivate, aimed at motivating Zambian Wikipedians to update pre-existing content, add new entries, and share their natural expertise. WikiMotivate was implemented as a Facebook plugin that utilizes leaderboard and badge gamification features to encourage and incentivize active Wikipedia content contribution. Using a mixed-methods approach, historical Wikipedia edit histories were used to quantify content contributed by Zambian Wikipedians. In addition, user surveys were conducted to determine relative levels of awareness about Wikipedia, willingness to contribute content on Wikipedia and perceived motivating factors that affect content contribution on Wikipedia. Furthermore, a Facebook plugin, WikiMotivate, was implemented in order to be used as a service for motivating potential Zambian Wikipedians. Finally, in order to determine the most effective approach, a comparative analysis of leader-boards and badges was conducted with nine (9) expert evaluators. The results clearly indicate that a significant proportion of Wikipedia content on and about Zambia is authored by Wikipedians from outside Zambia, with only 11% of the contributors, out of the 224, originating from Zambia. In addition, study participants were largely unaware of the various editing practices on Wikipedia; interestingly enough, most participants expressed their willingness to contribute content if trained. In terms of motivating factors, “Information Seeking and Educational Fulfillment” was the key motivating factor. The Facebook plugin implemented suggests that incorporating leaderboards and badges is a more effective approach to motivating contributions to Wikipedia. This study provides useful insight into the landscape of Wikipedia content contribution in the Global South. [1] https://unza.zm [2] https://datalab.unza.zm [3] https://emi.org.zm Best, Kinneret -- Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> *Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*

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Webrequest Migration
by Joseph Allemandou 01 Apr '25

01 Apr '25

Good morning data folks, This morning we migrate our webrequest dataset to feed from HAProxy instead of Varnish. The expected differences are documented in this google doc <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cCSGzLUfVWUHjqG5v5VdLADsbzmMklczQ1YG7og…>, as well as the detailed analysis and the migration plan. We expect to be done in a few hours, in the meantime you may experience failing queries if you use the webrequest data, and new data will not be flowing until we are done. For those interested in following the operation, we'll post on slack in this thread <https://wikimedia.slack.com/archives/C05RHK7PS6Q/p1743494545802669>. We'll post here again at the end of the operation. Thank you for your understanding :) -- Joseph Allemandou (joal) (he / him) Staff Data Engineer Wikimedia Foundation

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[Wikimedia Research Showcase] Gender Gaps- March 19 at 16:30 UTC
by Kinneret Gordon 19 Mar '25

19 Mar '25

Hi all, The March Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, March 19, at 9:30 AM PT / 16:30 UTC. Find your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1742401800>. March is Women's History Month <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_History_Month> in many parts of the world, making it a good time to discuss the latest research on *Gender Gapsֹֹ*- our theme for this month. We invite you to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/zRTdu-Ku1FU. As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. For this showcase we’re excited to feature three presentations, including a full-length talk and two presentations of research supported by the Wikimedia Research Fund: Online Images Amplify Gender Bias By *Douglas Guilbeault (Stanford University)* Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images, which are proliferating online. Images from platforms like Google and Wikipedia are downloaded by millions every day, and millions more are interacting via social media like Instagram and TikTok that primarily consist of exchanging visual content. In parallel, news agencies and digital advertisers are increasingly capturing attention online through the use of visual content, which people process more quickly, implicitly, and memorably than text. In this paper, we show that the rise of images online significantly exacerbates gender bias, both in its statistical prevalence and its psychological impact. We examine the gender associations of 3,495 social categories (such as nurse or banker) in over one million images from Google, Wikipedia, and IMDb, as well as in billions of words from these platforms. We find that gender bias is stronger and more prevalent in images than text for both female- and male-typed categories. We further show that the documented underrepresentation of women online is worse in images compared to not only text, but also public opinion and US census data. Finally, we conducted a nationally representative, pre-registered experiment which shows that googling for images rather than textual descriptions of occupations amplifies gender bias in participants’ beliefs. Addressing the societal impact of this large-scale shift toward visual communication will be essential for developing a fair and inclusive future for the internet. Measuring the Gender GapBy *Tianwa Chen (The University of Queensland)*In this presentation, I would like to present our three research works aimed at measuring the gender gap on Wikipedia through data-driven strategies. Our first study explores the estimation of gender completeness within Wikipedia, offering a new methodology for assessing content gaps. The second study analyses the evolution of gender diversity, employing visualizations to track the gender distribution in Wikipedia articles categorized under ‘Person’ over time. The third and ongoing study delves into the gender balancing efforts among Wikipedia editors. We are currently conducting interviews within the editor community and planning to develop a dashboard through a co-design approach. These studies collectively advance our understanding of gender representation and provide actionable insights to foster gender equality in the Wikipedia community.Addressing Wikipedia’s Gender Gaps Through Social Media AdsBy *Reham AL Tamime (University of Strathclyde)*Wikipedia’s well-documented gender gap remains a persistent challenge, with women underrepresented among contributors. While past efforts—such as Edit-a-thons, workshops, and social media campaigns—have aimed to bridge this gap, more targeted approaches remain under-explored. In this talk, I will present our project, which explores the use of social media advertising to reach and recruit women as Wikipedia editors. I will share preliminary findings from our targeted advertisements on LinkedIn, where we designed a survey to assess the effectiveness of the reach of the advertisement. Building on these insights, I will discuss how we have expanded our approach to include multiple social media platforms, refined targeting strategies, and developed various messages to increase reach and eventually participation in Wikipedia. Best,Kinneret -- Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> *Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*

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[Wikimedia Research Showcase] Wikipedia Administrators- February 26 at 17:30 UTC
by Kinneret Gordon 26 Feb '25

26 Feb '25

Hi all, The February Research Showcase will be live-streamed next Wednesday, February 26, at 9:30 AM PT / 17:30 UTC. Find your local time here <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1740591000>. The theme for this showcase is *Wikipedia Administrators*. We invite you to watch via the YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/r88qrgi6ozA. As always, you can join the conversation in the YouTube chat as soon as the showcase goes live. We have one longer presentation this month: *Where have all the admins gone? Wikipedia administrator recruitment, retention, and attrition*By *Eli Asikin-Garmager, Yu-Ming Liou, Claudia Lo, Caroline Myrick (Wikimedia Foundation)* Wikipedia administrators are users with extra rights who do work beyond editing, such as settling disputes and preventing repeated vandalism. The tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of administrative actions taken every month are vital to the healthy operation of any language version of Wikipedia. We will present results from a project investigating reasons administrators come, stay, and leave the role. We obtained baseline metrics of administrator in/outflow and activity, and conducted a mixed method, cross-comparative study of potential, current, and former administrators. Results show that the number of active administrators on larger Wikipedias has been declining since 2018, with some exceptions. Our presentation will unpack these findings and explore topics such as what motivates administrators to stay in the role, and what barriers may prevent new administrators from joining. Best, Kinneret -- Kinneret Gordon Lead Research Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> *Learn more about Wikimedia Research <https://research.wikimedia.org/>*

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Versatile Data Sets
by Jamie Willoughby 20 Feb '25

20 Feb '25

Dear Wiki Analytics Community, I am a data science student at Wesleyan University. This spring, my professor asked me to choose a data set to visualize. She suggested one that contains a combination of dates, geographic information, and quantitative and qualitative variables. My mind went to Wikipedia. I've spent a long time searching, but the volume of available data is overwhelming. Can you recommend a specific Wiki dataset? Thank you, Jamie Willoughby

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Data Lake Deployment Kick-off for Temporary Accounts changes
by Marcel Ruiz Forns 24 Jan '25

24 Jan '25

Hello Analytics, The Data Engineering team will start the deployment[1] of the changes that will support the Temp Accounts <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Trust_and_Safety_Product/Temporary_Accounts> initiative in the Data Lake <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Data_Lake> starting today Wednesday January 22nd 2025. These changes are not activating the Temp Accounts feature in any of the wikis, but rather enabling support for Temp Accounts in the Hadoop Data Lake. It is expected that some MediaWiki related Data Lake tables[2] might be temporarily unavailable during the following couple of days. By the end of this process MediaWikiHistory tables and other derivative tables will fully support Temp Accounts new semantics and data. As part of the deployment process we plan to re-run the jobs for the 2024-12 snapshot. This means the data model for that snapshot will be updated. The changes are mostly backwards compatible, except for: - The mediawiki_user_history table's `anonymous` field will be renamed to `is_anonymous`. - The geoeditors_edits_monthly table's `editors_are_anonymous` field will be renamed to `users_are_anonymous`. - The MediaWikiHistory dumps will have some new fields inserted, and the order of the existing fields will change. We haven't found any existing code (within the WMF) that could break due to these non-backwards compatible changes, but if you find any, please let us know. [1] Deployment plan <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-GhyLepEL7rqJlY1a2RKQ_1YI2QYgVpFSmzpq9n…> [2] List of affected tables - wmf.mediawiki_history - wmf.mediawiki_user_history - wmf.mediawiki_page_history - wmf.mediawiki_history_reduced - wmf.edit_hourly - wmf.editors_daily - wmf.unique_editors_by_country - wmf.geoeditors_edits_monthly - wmf.geoeditors_monthly - wmf.geoeditors_public_monthly -- *Marcel Ruiz Forns** (he/him)* Senior Software Engineer

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