Hey all,

I’m glad to announce that the Wikimedia Research team’s goals for the next quarter (January - March 2016) are up on wiki. 

The Research and Data team will continue to work with our volunteers and collaborators on revision scoring as a service adding support for 5 new languages and prototyping new models (including an edit type classifier). We will also continue to iterate on the design of article creation recommendations, running a dedicated campaign in coordination with existing editathons to improve the quality of these recommendations. Finally, we will extend a research project we started in November aimed at understanding the behavior of Wikipedia readers, by combining qualitative survey data with behavioral analysis from our HTTP request logs. 

The Design Research team will conduct an in-depth study of user needs (particularly readers) on the ground in February. We will continue to work with other Wikimedia Engineering teams throughout the quarter to ensure the adoption of human-centered design principles and pragmatic personas in our product development cycle. We’re also excited to start a collaboration with students at the University of Washington to understand what free online information resources (including, but not limited to, Wikimedia projects) students use.

I am also glad to report that two papers on link and article recommendations (the result of a formal collaboration with a team at Stanford) were accepted for presentation at WSDM '16 and WWW ’16 (preprints will be made available shortly). An overview on revision scoring as a service was published a few weeks ago on the Wikimedia blog, and got some good media coverage. 

We're constantly looking for contributors and as usual we welcome feedback on these projects via the corresponding talk pages on Meta. You can contact us for any question on IRC via the #wikimedia-research channel and follow @WikiResearch on Twitter for the latest Wikipedia and Wikimedia research updates hot off the press.

Wishing you all happy holidays,

Dario and Abbey on behalf of the team