Aaron has been a major contributor to our understanding of why we have a problem retaining new editors, during the 2011 Summer of Research and beyond. Many of our key findings are from his research. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail for more.

Welcome, Aaron!

Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 2:03 PM

To: WMF staff

Hi Everybody,

It's been a long time coming, but I'd like to welcome Aaron Halfaker to the Foundation! He is starting today as a Research Analyst on the Analytics team, working out of Minneapolis.

Aaron is a newly minted PhD out of the (well-known for Wikipedia studies) GroupLens Research lab. His thesis work is basically all about Wikipedia. In his research, he uses a mixture of behavioral modeling, participatory design, psychology and social science to understand, affect, and extend complex socio-technical systems like Wikipedia.

He's actually been working as a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2011. Most notably, he's worked with Dario to design experiments for Article Feedback, Notifications (aka Echo) and VisualEditor.

It's a pretty good fit and we're really happy that Aaron is joining us full time! Please extend him a warm welcome!

-Toby