The practical reason to start this process is to clean up and streamline pages used by the Wikimedia community and by the Foundation to document internal research projects and policies. The ambitious goal it to make Meta:Research the main hub where all research on Wikimedia projects (be it internal or external) is discussed, reviewed and tracked. The objectives we are hoping to achieve in the short term with this project are the following:

make it easy for researchers to find the resources and WMF support they are looking for
bring as much transparency as possible to research involving the Wikimedia community, by reducing attrition between the community and researchers and making sure research is not disruptive of editor activity
design a scheme of incentives to increase researcher participation and to increase the number of projects included in the Wikimedia research directory
design a series of incentives to nudge researchers towards releasing their datasets under an open license and publishing/self-archiving their research results via open access outlets/repositories.

Our long-term vision aims to:

provide support to the publication of research data on Wikimedia projects via a unified open data infrastructure [2]
integrate structured bibliographic data into Meta:Research via whatever solution the community decides to adopt [3]

Many on this list are already actively involved in editing and maintaining Meta research pages. Your feedback and suggestions on this project would be very valuable.

Dario

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee
[2] We are currently reviewing a number of solutions to set up a central repository of open research data: http://bit.ly/OpenDataPlatforms
[3] See the long discussion started on this list with this thread: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2011-March/001361.html

Dario Taraborelli, PhD

Senior Research Analyst

Wikimedia Foundation

http://wikimediafoundation.org

http://nitens.org/taraborelli