of
which I've just learned from your post is an excellent piece of
research, one that was needed for a very long time.
One question comes to mind: we now, roughly, how many editors we are
gaining per months. Are there any estimates on how many we are losing
(per month, year, total)? I cannot find such numbers in that survey.
--
Piotr Konieczny
Parul Vora wrote:
Hello everyone,
We (most of the current staff at the Wikimedia Foundation currently
engaging in research) had a chance to meet some of you at Wikisym and
Wikimania this year and thought it would be nice to introduce ourselves
and say hi to all of you! All of us have joined WMF in the past two
years and are working on projects or research questions that may be
relevant or of interest to all of you. Also, as far as I know, we are
all new to this list and will hopefully be talking and collaborating
with you more in the future - both here and on the Meta Research page.
So, in no particular order, some introductions from all of us:
From Nimish <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Nimish_Gautam>
(ngautam(a)wikimedia.org): Hi, I'm Nimish Gautam. I started with the
foundation in 2009 doing development for the Usability Initiative, which
focused on new editors. I like analyzing user behavior to figure out how
people use the tools we give them (turning templates into a programming
language, who would've guessed?) and spotting trends so we can improve
those tools to help people accomplish what it is they're trying to do.
Currently I'm doing qualitative and quantitative research on user
behavior for the foundation and its various projects, and very
interested in finding ways of chunking all this information together to
make pretty, compelling, informative resources so people know what's
going on in the wikiverse and hopefully want to be a part of it.
From Howie
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#User_Experience_Programs>
(hfung(a)wikimedia.org): Hello! I'm Howie and I'm a Senior Product Manager
at the Wikimedia Foundation. As a product person, I'd like to work with
the community towards more data-driven decision making. One area I'm
particularly interested in is getting a better understanding of our
user's lifecycle with our projects -- how they come to the projects, how
they start contributing, their experiences as a contributor, why they
leave, and why they return. I like to use both quantitative and
qualitative methods to obtain as complete a picture as we need to guide
our decisions. On the quantitative side, I'm working on getting better
web analytics for our projects. I'm also interested in any data mining
projects along these lines (e.g., contribution behavior, user lifecycle
patterns, etc.). On the qualitative side, I worked on the "Why Editors
Leave Wikipedia" survey and would be interested in other qualitative
measurements (e.g., interviews, surveys, focus groups). If you're
interested in any of the above topics, please drop me a line.
From Amy
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Public_Policy_Initiative>
(aroth(a)wikimedia.org): Hi, I'm Amy, the Research Analyst for the Public
Policy Initiative
<http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative>. My task
is to assess the project's impact on: U.S. public policy article
quality, public policy categorization, new articles, and new
contributors. Through the project I have focused on article quality
assessment, and worked with the community to add a quantitative value to
the current article assessment
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Quality_rating#Rubric>.
As a data analyst, I am interested in improving data accessibility from
Wikipedia. In my dreams, I envision data from the assessment tools that
exist within Wikipedia are captured in a real-time database, so that we
can observe what is currently happening in Wikipedia and how it is
evolving in the present, rather than having to use data dumps to get
snapshots of the state of Wikipedia. I have experience analyzing and
designing surveys and would like to use that experience to take a more
in depth look at contributor demographics and motivations. I am excited
to be a part of this huge collaborative project with a mission to make
knowledge accessible.
From me, Parul Vora
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Parulvora>
(pvora(a)wikimedia.org): Hi Everyone! I'm a researcher and designer with a
focus on participatory and collaborative spaces. I started at the
Wikimedia Foundation in 2009 and moving forward have interest in:
creating new forms of participation (beyond editing) on the projects
that better engage a wider audience with the content and each other;
assessing, evaluating and addressing the demographic and cultural biases
in our projects; and exploring location, culture and language as they
affect the development patterns of different language Wikipedias in an
effort to identify potential for experimentation and catalysis in
younger projects. I'm currently exploring the potential effect feedback
systems (article ratings, expert reviews, visualizations of an article's
history or a user's contributions) can have on the engagement of
readers, actions of editors, and the quality of content over time. I
like infovis, ux research, and unresearched innovation and I am
interested in learning more about research with wikipedia on motivation,
behavioral economic modeling and/or game theory, using geolocative data,
mobile experiences, and profiling and trend visualizations......and your
work too!
Let us know if you're interested in learning more, participating in, or
contributing to our efforts. And drop any of us a line if we could learn
from or contribute to what you've been working on.......