Hello Everyone,
I wanted to take a moment to introduce Diederik van Liere [1].
Diederik will be working with the Foundation on some research
projects to help the community get a better understanding of
editor patterns on Wikipedia. Below is a note from Diederik which
gives some insight into his research experience and interests. He
has done some interesting and relevant work on online communities,
most recently as a post-doc at the Rotman School of Management at
the University of Toronto. We're excited to have him as a
research consultant, so please join me in welcoming him!
Howie
[1] http://ca.linkedin.com/in/diederikvanliere
Diederik van Liere
My name is Diederik van Liere and I am a research consultant at the Wikimedia Foundation. I started last week on a project, in collaboration with Howie Fung and Erik Moeller, to better understand the editor dynamics of the different Wikipedia sites. My research interests are around the broad theme of community management and community effectiveness and in particular how online tools can help in that regard. I have researched open source communities such as Firefox and Thunderbird in my previous position at the Rotman School of Management. I enjoy all phases of quantitative research: writing custom data parsers, parallelizing 'big data' challenges, and building statistical models to gain more detailed answers to research questions. I have an interest in developing tools that will allow for parallelized / distributed data processing in order to shorten processing time and get answers back to the community faster.
I am excited to be part of this community because I strongly identify with Wikimedia's mission of making knowledge globally accessible and I am looking forward to the on- and offline collaborations with you. In the mean time, you will see the firsts posts about the Editor Dynamics project appearing on this mailing list and (soon) the Strategy Wiki. Feel free to drop me an email (dvanliere at gmail dot com) whenever you have a question about these topics.