Hi all,
Summary: I have made changes to the introduction description of this mailing list. This includes changes to what this mailing list is used for (reflecting more closely the reality of how it's been used for the past couple of years), more expanded information about other lists that you may want to be aware of, the mailing list norms, and the introduction of topics and tags. You can review the updated description at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l . As a participant of this mailing list, you are responsible to know the description of the mailing list and I kindly ask you to review it. Thanks! :)
Long version:
==Who am I?== I'm one of the admins of this list (and head of Research at Wikimedia Foundation).
==Why the change?== On a personal level: I want to be able to communicate with the research community around Wikimedia projects more often, I don't want to create a new list for my communications, and I saw the note about the limits on the frequency of posts in the old description of this list as something that "kept me out". Inspired by this need, I had a more comprehensive look at the full description.
The previous version of the description [1] had a few areas to improve based on the current needs and realities of this list. I name a couple of them below:
* We had a note about the frequency of emails to this list to be kept low. With the stack of technologies available to us today, we can relax this condition and ask for people to use tags/topics in the subject of their emails to allow for more emails to come to the list.
* The note on who can post to this list could be improved. It read "only people who are actively involved in research on Wikimedia projects should post to this list" while my understanding is that on this list we want to welcome research related questions from those who are not actively involved in research, too. For example, community organizers should feel welcome to ask research-related questions on this list.
==What process did I follow for this change?== I wrote my proposed changes in an etherpad and sent it to 10 people. These folks include the two other admins of this list, a couple of other Research folks from WMF, a few folks from the Wikimedia Research community, and two editors from the community who are active in the research space. I heard back from 3 of these folks with thumbs up and areas for improvement. I incorporated all the suggestions I received.
==What if you have suggestions for improvements?== Sure. Bring them up on this thread or privately. Please note that I will be in Wikidata Conference [2] and after that in our annual Research Offsite and may not be able to respond to you until 2019-11-01.
==Where can I see the updated description?== Please go to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l to review it.
Thanks, Leila
[1] Read the previous version of the description below:
The purpose of this mailing list is to discuss scientific research into the content and the communities of the Wikimedia projects: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki.
Research into the technology of Wikimedia, MediaWiki, should primarily be discussed on <a href="http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l">wikitech-l</A> instead. For content or community research projects with a strong technological component, cross-posting to both lists may be advisable.
Please note that only people who are actively involved in research on Wikimedia projects should post to this list. Typical on-topic posts include:
<UL><LI>announcement of a new research project <LI>discussions of methodology <LI>questions and answers about related projects </UL>
Mailing list traffic should be kept at a reasonably low level. The list is softly moderated, and individuals posting off-topic material repeatedly may be removed.
This list is not directly associated with the <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Network">Wikimedia Research Network</A>, though members of the Network are welcome to post here if they are involved in research projects relating to content or community. Internal Wikimedia matters, discussions of new projects and similar threads should be kept off the list.
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2019
-- Leila Zia Principal Research Scientist, Head of Research Wikimedia Foundation