New subject: February 2015 Research Showcase: Global South survey results; data imports in OpenStreetMap

12 Feb 2015

I am thrilled to announce our speaker lineup for this month’s research showcase
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/Showcase#February_2015>.

Our own Haitham Shammaa will present results from the Global South survey. We also invited
Stamen’s Alan McConchie, an OpenStreetMap expert, to talk about the challenges the OSM
community is facing with external data imports.

The showcase will be recorded and publicly streamed at 11.30 PT on Wednesday, February 18
(livestream link will follow). We’ll hold a discussion and take questions from remote
participants via the Wikimedia Research IRC channel (#wikimedia-research
<http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikimedia-research> on freenode).

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Dario

Global South User Survey 2014
By Haitham Shammaa <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:HaithamS_(WMF)>
Users' trends in the Global South have significantly changed over the past two years,
and given the increase in interest in Global South communities and their activities, we
wanted this survey to focus on understanding the statistics and needs of our users (both
readers, and editors) in the regions listed in the WMF's New Global South Strategy
<https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:WMF%27s_New_Global_South_Strategy.pdf>. This
survey aims to provide a better understanding of the specific needs of local user
communities in the Global South, as well as provide data that supports product and program
development decision making process.

Ingesting Open Geodata: Observations from OpenStreetMap
By Alan McConchie <http://stamen.com/studio/alan>
As Wikidata grapples with the challenges of ingesting external data sources such as
Freebase, what lessons can we learn from other open knowledge projects that have had
similar experiences? OpenStreetMap, often called "The Wikipedia of Maps", is a
crowdsourced geospatial data project covering the entire world. Since the earliest years
of the project, OSM has combined user contributions with existing data imported from
external sources. Within the OSM community, these imports have been controversial; some
core OSM contributors complain that imported data is lower quality than user-contributed
data, or that it discourages the growth of local mapping communities. In this talk,
I'll review the history of data imports in OSM, and describe how OSM's
best-practices have evolved over time in response to these critiques.