Hi all,
The Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation has officially started a new
Formal Collaboration [1] with Mo Houtti and Loren Terveen of University of
Minnesota to work collaboratively on understanding article importance [2]
as part of the Addressing Knowledge Gaps program [3]. We are thankful to
them for agreeing to spend their time and expertise on this project in the
coming year.
Here are a few pieces of information about this collaboration that we would
like to share with you:
* We aim to keep the research documentation for this project in the
corresponding research page on meta [2].
* Research tasks are hard to break down and track in task-tracking systems.
This being said, tasks related to this project that can be captured on
Phabricator will be captured under here [4].
* I act as the point of contact for this research in the Wikimedia
Foundation. Please feel free to reach out to me (directly, if it cannot be
shared publicly) if you have comments or questions about the project.
Best,
Isaac
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Formal_collaborations
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Prioritization_of_Wikipedia_Articl…
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:2030#Knowledge_gaps
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155541
--
Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
I hope this email finds you well.
We are going to open a position in the Research team [1] at the
Wikimedia Foundation and given the nature of the role (focused on the
research community building aspect of our work), I'd like to offer a
period of two weeks (until 2021-02-21) to hear your ideas about how to
improve specific aspects of the opening. If you would like to provide
optional feedback, please read on. Otherwise, you can safely stop
here.
==Background==
Over the past year or so, it has become evident to me that delivering
towards Section 4 of the Foundations whitepaper [2] the Research team
wrote in 2019 requires a dedicated individual in our team to focus on
this direction. We're going to open a position in our team for this
reason.
==Why are you asking for my input?==
We normally don't ask for the input from the community on the
specifics of the job descriptions. I'm making an exception in this
case because of the nature of the work for this particular position.
==Roles and responsibilities==
These are the roles and responsibilities I currently envision to ask
of the person who joins us in this capacity:
* Developing, maintaining, and executing a research capacity and
outreach strategy in collaboration with the Head of Research and
rooted in the priority areas identified (Section 4 of the whitepaper
on the Foundations)
* Maintaining, revamping and expanding the already existing research
community programs including the Formal Collaboration program [3], the
Research Internship program, and the Research Fellow program.
* Organizing events such as the public Monthly Office Hours [4],
Monthly Research Showcases [5], and the annual Wiki Workshop [6] in
collaboration with the rest of the team
* Serving as the liaison and facilitating engagement between the
existing Wikimedia research community and the Wikimedia Research team
* Actively working to expand the existing Wikimedia research community
to include more regions of the world and more diverse disciplines
* Understanding and triaging the needs of the Wikimedia research
communities and advocating for resources internally to meet them
* Communicating and promoting the Research team’s work to external and
diverse audiences
* Discussing, documenting and communicating the process and results of
your work publicly
==Who can provide input?==
Everyone on this list should feel welcome to. Given the nature of the
position and the focus on research community building, I expect to
hear the bulk of the feedback from those of you already active in the
research community, as organizers or researchers.
==What feedback am I seeking?==
Please focus your feedback on the "Roles and responsibilities"
section. Have I missed a responsibility? Is there a lack of clarity
around one or more of the ones already listed? ...
==What happens to your feedback?==
I commit to read all constructive feedback I receive by 2021-02-21 and
take them into account in updating the responsibility section of the
job description that we will post. I want to be clear that I may not
be able to implement particular feedback. My commitment is to
seriously consider them.
==What happens in parallel to this opportunity for providing feedback?==
For the sake of full transparency: I will start the process of
finalizing the job description with our Talent and Culture department,
including finalizing the title, experiences we will need for the role,
and the responsibilities. I will not completely finalize the job
description until the feedback period is over, however, so that I can
make the adjustments needed.
==Where can you provide feedback?==
You have 2 venues for doing so. On this email thread or in-person in
one of the two time-slots below:
February 11, 21:30-22:00 PST, link to connect:
https://meet.google.com/wrt-zypn-bxs
February 17, 8:00-8:30 PST, link to connect:
https://meet.google.com/igz-xboq-mwx
==What if you have questions?==
Feel free to join me in one of the two office hours posted above or
get in touch on this thread, on or off-thread.
==Will there be a reminder for this?==
No. If you are interested in engaging, please take a note on your end.
I am not planning to send reminders. :)
If you have made this far, thank you! :) I'm looking forward to
hearing from you. I also want to share that I'm excited that we are
given the opportunity to bring a dedicated resource in our team to
focus on the community aspect of our work. There is a lot to be done
for you all already in the Wikimedia research community and towards
those who are not part of this community today but they can be. :)
Best,
Leila
[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foundations_-_Wikimedia_Research_2030.…
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Formal_collaborations
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
[6] https://wikiworkshop.org/
--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
We've opened a position in the Research team at the Wikimedia
Foundation to bring onboard a Research Community Officer. You can read
more about the role and responsibilities at
https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/2950273?gh_src=0b430d3f1us
.
Apply if you're interested or share the posting with those who may be
interested.
Best,
Leila
--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
Dear All,
The Access to Knowledge (A2K) team at the Centre for Internet and Society, India has been engaged with work on research on Indian language Wikimedia projects since 2019. You may see some of our recently published reports here:
1.Mapping GLAM in Maharashtra:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mapping_GLAM_in_Mahara…
2.Understanding Gaps on Wikidata on Cultural Heritage Structures in Bengal:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Research/Understanding_the_d…
This year, following up on learnings from work so far, we are undertaking a needs assessment exercise to a) understand the awareness about research within Indian language Wikimedia communities and identify existing projects if any, and b) gather community inputs on knowledge gaps and priority areas of focus and the role of research in addressing the same.
We would therefore request interested community members, working with or interested in research on Indian language Wikimedia projects to respond to the needs assessment questionnaire here:https://forms.gle/2xGAUBKSVJTK7Wks9
The deadline to submit a response has been extended till 5 March 2021. Feel free to write in any language. Please write to us with your queries at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CIS-A2K/Research
best wishes,
sneha
--
P.P Sneha
The Centre for Internet and Society
Bangalore
http://cis-india.org/
Dear all,
As many researchers are currently investigating how the COVID-19
pandemic affected contribution and collaboration on Wikipedia, I thought
I'd share the preprint of our quantitative analysis of editor
contributions during the pandemic, which suggests encouraging findings
for the Wikimedia volunteer community (see abstract below):
"Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility
restrictions"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10090
best,
thorsten
------------------
Authors:
Thorsten Ruprechter, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Tiago Santos, Florian
Lemmerich, Markus Strohmaier, Robert West, Denis Helic
Abstract:
Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever created, is a global initiative
driven by volunteer contributions. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out
and mobility restrictions ensued across the globe, it was unclear
whether Wikipedia volunteers would become less active in the face of the
pandemic, or whether they would rise to meet the increased demand for
high-quality information despite the added stress inflicted by this
crisis. Analyzing 223 million edits contributed from 2018 to 2020 across
twelve Wikipedia language editions, we find that Wikipedia's global
volunteer community responded remarkably to the pandemic, substantially
increasing both productivity and the number of newcomers who joined the
community. For example, contributions to the English Wikipedia increased
by over 20% compared to the expectation derived from pre-pandemic data.
Our work sheds light on the response of a global volunteer population to
the COVID-19 crisis, providing valuable insights into the behavior of
critical online communities under stress.
--
Thorsten Ruprechter
Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science (ISDS)
Graz University of Technology, Austria
Hi Goran,
We'll keep an eye toward consistency, but we have not made the data
extraction into a fully automated process.
We identified 3 columns that had slightly different names and we'll fix
them:
overall SIZE rank (2020) vs. overall size rank (2018, 2019)
second month editor retention (2020) vs. second-month new editor retention
(2018, 2019)
monthly structured discussions messages (2020) vs. monthly structured
discussions (Flow) messages (2018, 2019)
The "project code" column was duplicated in 2020; the duplicate has now
been removed.
Finally, in 2019 we had added 3 new columns that we hadn't tracked in
2018: content pages, cumulative content edits, edits per content page.
Please be aware that we may add or change columns in the future as needs
evolve.
Warm regards,
Kate
On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 12:37 PM Goran Milovanovic <
goran.milovanovic_ext(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
> Well, it would be desirable to maintain consistent column names across the
> years...
>
> Best,
> Goran
>
> Goran S. Milovanović, PhD
> Data Scientist, Software Department
> Wikimedia Deutschland
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> "It's not the size of the dog in the fight,
> it's the size of the fight in the dog."
> - Mark Twain
> ------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 2:42 AM Jennifer Wang <jwang(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For your reference we have updated wiki comparison dataset
>> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Product_Analytics/Comparison_datasets>
>> with 2020 data
>> <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a-UBqsYtJl6gpauJyanx0nyxuPqRvhzJRN8…>
>> . If you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know via
>> product-analytics(a)wikimedia.org.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jennifer & Product Analytics
>> _______________________________________________
>> Analytics mailing list
>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>
>
2nd Call for Papers
formal papers - informal papers - doctoral programme
14th Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics
- CICM 2021 -
July 26-31, 2020
Timisoara, Romania
http://www.cicm-conference.org/2021
----------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: Invited Speakers
* Alessandro Cimatti (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, IT)
* Michael Kohlhase (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)
* Laura Kovacs (TU Vienna, Austria)
* Angus McIntyre (London/Edinburgh, UK)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Digital and computational solutions are becoming the prevalent means
for the generation, communication, processing, storage and curation of
mathematical information.
CICM brings together the many separate communities that have developed
theoretical and practical solutions for mathematical applications such
as computation, deduction, knowledge management, and user interfaces.
It offers a venue for discussing problems and solutions in each of
these areas and their integration.
CICM 2021 Programme committee:
see https://www.cicm-conference.org/2021/cicm.php?event=&menu=pc
CICM 2021 invites submissions in all topics relating to intelligent
computer mathematics, in particular but not limited to
* theorem proving and computer algebra
* mathematical knowledge management
* digital mathematical libraries
CICM appreciates the varying nature of the relevant research in this
area and invites submissions of different forms:
1) Formal submissions will be reviewed rigorously and accepted papers
will be published in a volume of Springer LNCS:
* regular papers (up to 15 pages including references) present
novel research results
* project and survey papers (up to 15 pages + bibliography)
summarize existing results
* system and dataset descriptions (up to 5 pages including
references) present digital artifacts
* system entry (1 page according to the given LaTeX template)
provides metadata and a quick overview of a new tool or a new
release of an existent tool
2) Informal submissions will be reviewed with a positive bias and
selected for presentation based on their relevance for the
community.
* informal papers may present work-in-progress, project
announcements, position statements, etc.
* posters and system demos will be presented in parallel in special
sessions
3) The doctoral programme provides PhD students with a forum to
present early results and receive constructive feedback and
mentoring.
*** Important Dates ***
- Abstract deadline: March 15, 2021
- Full paper deadline: March 26, 2021
- Reviews sent to authors: May 4, 2021
- Rebuttals due: May 8, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: May 13, 2021
- Camera-ready copies due: May 29, 2021
- Conference: July 26-31, 2021
Informal submissions and doctoral programme
- Submission deadline: May 15, 2021
- Notification of acceptance: June 1, 2021
All submissions should be made via easychair at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cicm2021
As in previous years, we will publish the CICM 2021 proceedings with
Springer LNCS.
This year, "Fair Ranking" is returning to TREC (the Text REtrieval
Conference: https://trec.nist.gov/). This is an opportunity to participate
in a "coopetition" to develop and evaluate techniques for fair ranking in
an information retrieval setting. This year the focus will be on
identifying Wikipedia articles that are relevant to WikiProjects, which is
a really interesting challenge!
== Registration
TREC is a little different from a lot of conferences - you register to
participate before you do the work, and the conference itself is presenting
on what you've done - but there's a "How to TREC" guide that will hopefully
demystify the process: https://fair-trec.github.io/how-to-trec
If you have questions, the best way is to post them to the Google group:
https://fair-trec.github.io/how-to-trec#where-can-i-ask-more-questions
It looks like there is a February 23rd deadline to submit an intention to
participate (that is non-binding though so don't hesitate to register):
https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/call2021.html
Best,
Isaac (a co-organizer of the track)
--
Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, February 17,
at 9:00 AM PST/17:00 UTC (Note that this is 30 minutes earlier than the
usual time). This month’s showcase will be around the topic of censorship
(of Wikipedia). In the first talk, Daniel Romero presents a study examining
the effect of censorship on the collaborative behavior of editors. In the
second talk, Margaret Roberts presents work on disaggregating the effects
of censorship on proactive vs incidental consumption of information.
Youtube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z52wPt34rJc
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
Talk 1:
Speaker: Daniel Romero (University of Michigan)
Title: Shocking the Crowd: The Effect of Censorship Shocks on Chinese
Wikipedia
Abstract: Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular approach to
organizing work across the globe. Being global also means being vulnerable
to shocks – unforeseen events that disrupt crowds – that originate from any
country. In this study, we examine changes in collaborative behavior of
editors of Chinese Wikipedia that arise due to the 2005 government
censorship in mainland China. Using the exogenous variation in the fraction
of editors blocked across different articles due to the censorship, we
examine the impact of reduction in group size, which we denote as the shock
level, on three collaborative behavior measures: volume of activity,
centralization, and conflict. We find that activity and conflict drop on
articles that face a shock, whereas centralization increases. The impact of
a shock on activity increases with shock level, whereas the impact on
centralization and conflict is higher for moderate shock levels than for
very small or very high shock levels. These findings provide support for
threat rigidity theory – originally introduced in the organizational theory
literature – in the context of large-scale collaborative crowds.
Talk 2
Speaker: Margaret Roberts (University of California San Diego)
Title: Censorship's Effect on Incidental Exposure to Information: Evidence
from Wikipedia
Abstract: The fast-growing body of research on internet censorship has
examined the effects of censoring selective pieces of political information
and the unintended consequences of censorship of entertainment. However, we
know very little about the broader consequences of coarse censorship or
censorship that affects a large array of information such as an entire
website or search engine. In this study, we use China’s complete block of
Chinese language Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) on May 19, 2015, to
disaggregate the effects of coarse censorship on proactive consumption of
information—information users seek out—and on incidental consumption of
information—information users are not actively seeking but consume when
they happen to come across it. We quantify the effects of censorship of
Wikipedia not only on proactive information consumption but also on
opportunities for exploration and incidental consumption of information. We
find that users from mainland China were much more likely to consume
information on Wikipedia about politics and history incidentally rather
than proactively, suggesting that the effects of censorship on incidental
information access may be politically significant.
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation