This is Leila from WMF Research. Recently, we have been receiving a lot of requests about search queries. Here is a response we've given to another researcher few days ago, FYI, and hopefully it will be helpful.
Leila
------------------
As
you well know, access to the data you're asking for is not
straightforward, and it's a topic that resurfaces every few months, as
the editor community is also very interested in it. See for example a
recent discussion in
here.
There are a few things the Research team (that I'm a member of) needs to know before we can say more:
*
We need a proposal from you and your collaborators of your project explaining what the project is, a short
description of the methodology you're proposing or approaches you want
to try, and how the project can contribute to Wikimedia Foundation's
mission/plans and/or Wikimedia/Wikipedia community. If there is
something in our
annual plan
that catches your eyes as a potential alignment, please bring that up to us in your proposal.
You can create a page at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
for your project and share a link with us. Note that the proposal shouldn't be long. See for example the proposal for
this research (search for "Proposal" in the page).
* If you are under time constraints, please be explicit about it in your proposal. Looking at the
current list of our collaborations,
and knowing that there are few more in the process, you may have to
wait for some time before one of us can work with you to make it happen, of course if your proposal is passed by the team.
* To learn more about our formal collaborations, which is the way such access to data can be made possible, please read
here.