Hi Yaroslav,

the request has just been implemented: there's a brand new "Research:" namespace we can now work with.
I'll take a stab at it this week and start moving stuff around, this is roughly the structure I had in mind:

We should organize the Research section of Meta around three different types of resources:
• Projects - listing current and past studies, spanning both internal WMF research and external research
• Policies - the body of official policies produced by the RCom
• Resources - including tools, materials and pointers for researchers
(we could also include a fourth category, i.e. "People" or "Teams", for researchers to maintain their contact information and add a description of their current and past work, should User pages not be suitable for this purpose). Pages belonging to the same category should all ideally have a predefined structure and use the same templates.

On top of these 3 (or 4) main sections we will need to create some easily accessible top pages, such as:

Research:Index
this will be the landing page pointing visitors to the relevant subpages (something along the lines of Aaron's intro page would work great). Erik suggested we pull into this page the list of research projects to make them easily accessible. My feeling though is that the "Projects/" prefix is useful to quickly identify research project pages from the URL. I suggest we keep the projects directory under Research:Projects and add a prominent navigational template to all pages to make it easy to access this directory from any other page on Research.

Research:Committee
we should move to this node all information about the RCom, its activities and areas of interests as well as any open discussions/drafts. I suggest that we move actual RCom-driven research project (such as the Expert participation survey) under Projects/ and that we separate discussions from official documents by moving the latter under Policies/ – the lack of a clear distinction between past and ongoing discussions on the one hand and official documents on the other hand has plagued Meta for a long time, I'd love to address this issue in the overhaul of the Research section.

We should also decide whether to move or not all legacy research pages to the new namespace (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Research). If we do (which sounds like a good option to me) we will need to flag obsolete or archived discussions to keep them separate from the current RCom work.

Thoughts? If this makes sense to you all we can start moving/rewriting pages. We will need to make a public announcement on wikiresearch-l once we have the basic structure in place so others can contribute.

Dario

On May 2, 2011, at 2:58 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:


On Mon, 2 May 2011 11:06:36 -0700, Dario Taraborelli
<dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everybody,

we are currently creating a new "Research:" namespace on Meta:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28742

as soon as the request is processed we will be able to use this
dedicated
namespace to host all RCom-related activities and documentation, which
will
allow us to filter and search pages more easily, to create shortcuts and
to
set up special properties for all pages in the namespace.

You may want to wait until the change is implemented, or we will rename
any existing research page to the new namespace as soon as it goes live.

Dario


Thanks, Dario.

I am travelling till the end of the week, and I hope the request will be
implemented by the end of the week.

Cheers
Yaroslav

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