Aaron has been a major contributor to our understanding of why we have a problem retaining new editors, during the 2011 Summer of Research and beyond. Many of our key findingshttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/Summary_of_Findingsare from his research. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail for more.
Welcome, Aaron!
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org Date: Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 2:03 PM To: WMF staff
Hi Everybody,
It's been a long time coming, but I'd like to welcome Aaron Halfaker to the Foundation! He is starting today as a Research Analyst on the Analytics team, working out of Minneapolis.
Aaron is a newly minted PhD out of the (well-known for Wikipedia studies) GroupLens Research lab. His thesis work is basically all about Wikipedia. In his research, he uses a mixture of behavioral modeling, participatory design, psychology and social science to understand, affect, and extend complex socio-technical systems like Wikipedia.
He's actually been working as a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2011. Most notably, he's worked with Dario to design experiments for Article Feedback, Notifications (aka Echo) and VisualEditor.
It's a pretty good fit and we're really happy that Aaron is joining us full time! Please extend him a warm welcome!
-Toby