All,
these are highlights from a session the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research & Data team hosted at CSCW ’14 in Baltimore. The audience was a group of researchers either working on Wikipedia/Wikimedia-related research projects or interested in learning about opportunities to collaborate with the Foundation.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions/comments. Contact Dario Taraborelli - dario@wikimedia.org Aaron Halfaker - ahalfaker@wikimedia.org Jonathan Morgan - jmorgan@wikimedia.org
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-research (webclient)
Mailing list: wiki-research-l (mailing list)
Resources We gave a short overview of existing resources of potential interest to Wikipedia/Wikimedia researchers:
OAuth allows 3rd-party software to edit Wikipedia on behalf of a Wikipedia editor and it’s a (mostly untapped) opportunity to run experimental research or test new interfaces targeted at Wikipedians. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OAuth#Using_OAuth Data portal summarizes data sources that are currently available to researchers and app developers. See: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data Wikimedia Research Newsletter: A monthly overview reviewing or summarizing recent research (contributions are welcome, please contact Dario if you’re interested in contributing) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter Subject recruitment. Aaron and Dario have managed a process for documenting and vetting subject recruitment occurring on Wikimedia projects. This process was set in place to help resolve the tension between researchers’ need to recruit subjects and editors’ desire to not be bothered. The process involves a public discussion and mentorship in order to ensure that proposed studies that affect editors are well documented, are addressing original questions and do not result in unnecessary disruption of wiki work. This is a service we’ve been providing on a volunteer basis as members of the Research Committee, it’s meant to offer support to researchers but doesn’t eliminate the risk that an account used for recruitment purposes might be blocked by an administrator. IRBs and minors. One of the issues that we discussed is dealing with IRB & other ethics boards’ requirements when studies may result in interaction with minors. Aaron ahalfaker@wikimedia.org is willing to discuss the issue with researchers and university staff upon request. Annual survey modules. Interest was expressed in exploring strategies for expanding the annual editor/reader survey with new questions contributed by researchers. At this point (March 2014) we cannot commit to any such project, but in general there is potential for cooperations between WMF and academic researchers in this area. Interested parties should contact Tilman Bayer (tbayer at wikimedia dot org) who has been conducting the last WMF editor survey and can provide information about these surveys (methodology, results, available data etc.) and their calendar.
WikiResearch Workshop at CSCW 2015. We discussed planning a workshop for CSCW next year. Anyone who is interested in collaborating, please contact us. Details are TBD, but our general goals include: increase awareness of the public data resources that are available highlight research areas that are ripe for investigation, esp. where WMF could benefit from the results get a better sense of what kind of data resources (and/or what data formats) researchers would like to have brainstorm a (lightweight, ethical, practical) model for partnership between WMF and academic research orgs that want access to certain non-public data
Wiki Research Hackathons. On Nov. 9th, 2013, we held our first global research hackathon (announcement). We had universities and other local meetups from around the world connect via Google Hangout to share ideas, data and presentations geared toward datasets, code and other resources. We’ll be planning another hackathon in the coming months. You can help by hosting or attending your own local event. Please contact us if you’re interested.
Public listing on WMF’s strategic research questions. We discussed the potential for the Wikimedia Foundation to list out key areas of research that we are interested in. This is something we are keenly interested in and you should expect to hear from us soon through wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch.
Tweet @WikiResearch. We maintain a relatively high-visibility twitter account from which we tweet about new research, data, and other initiatives. If you tweet about your own wiki-related work @WikiResearch, we will retweet it so long as it’s relevant. We will also experiment with the use of this Twitter handle to increase the visibility of libraries and analytics tools to support Wikipedia research.
Internships/grad student residencies. We talked briefly about research collaborations, internships and other forms of work opportunities at WMF. We’re actively exploring possibilities and will broadcast details through wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch when we know more.
We’re hiring. We are looking to expand the research team at WMF, if you are interested in working with us keep an eye on wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch for job openings or contact us off-list.