As part of its product development program, the Wikimedia Foundation's Tech Department will be releasing regular data dumps for all the features that are currently being implemented. The first weekly dumps from the Article Feedback Tool – an experimental feature to engage readers to interact with Wikipedia's contents via a quality rating system [1] – are available since this afternoon [2]. The latest datasets contain raw ratings data collected each week from a random sample of 100K articles of the English Wikipedia. More datasets will be released in the coming weeks as we deploy new features.
Over the summer a new series of datasets produced by the participants in the Wikimedia Summer of Research [3] will be released and an open data repository will be announced to host and permanently identify these datasets. Further details on this program and WMF's open data policy will follow on the Foundation's blog and on this list.
Dario
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Data
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011
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Dario Taraborelli, PhD
Senior Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://nitens.org/taraborelli
(reposting from the WMF blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/07/12/introducing-the-wikimedia-research-ind… )
For a long time resources for researchers and information about research of Wikimedia projects have been incomplete, unmaintained and scattered. Support for researchers from the Foundation has been ad-hoc and there hasn’t been a team in charge of reviewing external support requests or to facilitate collaboration with external researchers. To answer to these problems the Research Committee recently started to rebuild the research documentation available on Meta. Today we are proud to announce the first version of the Wikimedia Research Index, the single go-to point for all research-related needs at Wikimedia.
The main purpose of a research index is to centralize documentation on research of Wikimedia projects, but also to create a place for the community to discuss and learn about this research. The Wikimedia Research Index will:
provide documentation on resources for Wikimedia researchers, including datasets, tools and code libraries, conferences and events
act as a point of contact for researchers with each other and the Foundation (by complementing wiki-research-l)
formalize support for research projects and specify what the Foundation expects from the projects it supports
host research policies and guidelines
track research projects (both initiated by the Foundation and by the research community) that study Wikimedia contents and communities or that build innovative results and applications on top of Wikimedia data
These are some highlights from the Research Index:
we have been working on a set of policies to ensure that research supported in different forms by the Foundation isreleased in the open (with respect not only to its output, but also to code and data). The new open access/open data policy of the Foundation will be announced in a separate post.
as part of this work, we will be announcing soon the first in a series of monthly research newsletters covering the most recent updates in Wikimedia research, modeled around the Signpost
we will be highlighting via the Research Index, the Foundation’s blog and the research newsletter a series of featured projects that touch on issues of particular strategic importance. The first featured project is the Wikimedia Summer of Research, hosted by WMF Community department
we created a dedicated IRC channel on Freenode as a friendly place to discuss in real time issues of relevance to Wikimedia research
The Research Index is, by definition, a constant work in progress and there are several ways in which you can help us improve it: as a researcher, by making sure that your past and current projects are documented in the research project directory and by bringing to our attention to any results, calls for papers and research-related initiatives we should be aware of (particularly if you wish to have them included in the research newsletter); as a community member by participating in project-specific discussions, by highlighting issues that are particularly sensitive from a community perspective and by suggesting topics and issues in search of an answer from the research community.
We hope with this initiative to increase the volume, speed, impact and potential audience of research that helps improve our understanding of Wikimedia projects and communities.
Dario
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Dario Taraborelli, PhD
Senior Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://nitens.org/taraborelli
We are proud to announce the second data challenge co-organized this summer by the Wikimedia Foundation.
WikiSym and the Wikimedia Foundation are jointly launching WikiViz 2011 – a call for data/information visualization experts, computational journalists, data artists and data scientists to create the most insightful visualization of Wikipedia’s impact. The goal of the competition is to use open datasets to help improve our understanding of how Wikipedia is affecting the world beyond the scope of its own community.
The award:
The WikiViz 2011 Awarding Ceremony will take place on October 4, at the WikiSym 2011 venue, the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley campus (Mountain View, California). The ceremony will be introduced by a keynote by Jeff Heer (Stanford University), on the impact of emerging visualization techniques to understand open collaboration today. Three finalist teams (1 winner, 2 runners-up) will be invited to present their work at WikiSym 2011. Travel expenses and registration fees will be covered for a delegate per team. The works from these three teams will be showcased at the WikiSym 2011 exhibit, presented during the WikiViz awards ceremony and featured by our Knowledge and Media Partners: El Mundo.es, the largest digital newspaper in Spanish by readership worldwide, as well as four among the leading outlets and organizations in data visualization: FlowingData, Information Aesthetics, Visualizing.org and Periscopic). Unidad Editorial will also run a dedicated “Public's choice” track among the top 10 submissions received. The winner will be featured on the digital edition of El Mundo.
The jury:
The finalists will be selected by a jury composed by world-class experts in data visualization and social computing
• Moritz Stefaner, Well Formed Data
• Kim Rees, Periscopic)
• Andrew Vande Moere, KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics
• Erik Zachte, Wikimedia Foundation
• Gregorio Convertino, Xerox PARC and WikiSym
The official announcement:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/07/05/wikiviz-2011-visualizing-the-impact-o…
The call for participation:
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/wikiviz:cfp
Contacts, news and updates:
For any questions, comments or interest in supporting or collaborating with this challenge, please contact the co-organizers at: wikiviz2011 [at] easychair [dot] org
• Felipe Ortega, WikiSym
• Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation
You can also follow us on Twitter: @WikiViz (tag your tweets with #wikiviz11)
/Please distribute this message widely/
*Call for referendum*: The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of
the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether
members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in
personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen
particular types of images strictly for their own account.
Further details and educational materials will be available shortly.
The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August, 2011, and will be
conducted on servers hosted by a neutral third party. Referendum
details, officials, voting requirements, and supporting materials will
be posted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum
shortly.
For the coordinating committee,
Philippe (WMF)
Cbrown1023
Risker
Mardetanha
PeterSymonds
Robert Harris
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Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
A position is available in the SoNet (Social Networking) research unit
at Bruno Kessler Foundation, Center for Information Technology,
Trento, Italy. The SoNet research unit focuses its research on the
social side of Wikipedia and wikis.
The successful candidate will join our group working on a project
whose goal is to mine, analyze and computationally model the
individual and collective behaviour in communities and social networks
of Wikipedia users.
The ideal candidate should have:
* Ph.D. level education in a relevant discipline
* A good record of relevant research published in peer-reviewed
conferences or journals
* Strong empirical and analytical orientation, with experience in
handling large amounts of data coming from user action logs and social
networks
* Experience with statistics and with analysis of complex networks
* Knowledge of at least one of Python, Perl, C/C++, R, Java
* Proficiency in both written and spoken English
Additional requirements:
* Prior experience in using social media for disseminating personal research
* Interdisciplinary background
* Experience with GNU/Linux systems
Type of contract: co.co.pro (collaboration contract) for one year.
Initial appointments are for one year and renewal is based on
performance.
Feel free to contact me if you have any question and you can find more
information and how to apply at
http://risorseumane.fbk.eu/sites/risorseumane.fbk.eu/files/call%20SONET_P_2…
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Paolo Massa
Head of SoNet research group: http://sonet.fbk.eu
Blog: http://gnuband.org