Hey all,
I’m glad to announce that the Wikimedia Research team’s goals
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Goals#January_-_March_2016_.28Q3.29>
for
the next quarter (January - March 2016) are up on wiki.
The Research and Data
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research#Research_and_Data> team
will continue to work with our volunteers and collaborators on revision
scoring as a service <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:Revscoring> adding
support for 5 new languages and prototyping new models (including an edit
type classifier
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Automated_classification_of_edit_types>).
We will also continue to iterate on the design of article creation
recommendations
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Increasing_article_coverage>,
running a dedicated campaign in coordination with existing editathons to
improve the quality of these recommendations. Finally, we will extend a
research project we started in November aimed at understanding the behavior
of Wikipedia readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour>
, by combining qualitative survey data with behavioral analysis from our
HTTP request logs.
The Design Research
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research#Design_Research> team
will conduct an in-depth study of user needs (particularly readers) on the
ground in February. We will continue to work with other Wikimedia
Engineering teams throughout the quarter to ensure the adoption of
human-centered design principles and pragmatic personas
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Personas_for_product_development> in our
product development cycle. We’re also excited to start a collaboration
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Publicly_available_online_learning_resource_survey>
with
students at the University of Washington to understand what free online
information resources (including, but not limited to, Wikimedia projects)
students use.
I am also glad to report that two papers on link and article
recommendations (the result of a formal collaboration with a team at
Stanford) were accepted for presentation at WSDM '16 and WWW ’16 (preprints
will be made available shortly). An overview on revision scoring as a
service
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/> was
published a few weeks ago on the Wikimedia blog, and got some good media
coverage
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Revision_scoring_as_a_service/Media>
.
We're constantly looking for contributors and as usual we welcome feedback
on these projects via the corresponding talk pages on Meta. You can contact
us for any question on IRC via the #wikimedia-research channel and follow
@WikiResearch <https://twitter.com/WikiResearch> on Twitter for the latest
Wikipedia and Wikimedia research updates hot off the press.
Wishing you all happy holidays,
Dario and Abbey on behalf of the team
*Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org •
nitens.org • @readermeter
<http://twitter.com/readermeter>