Hi there wikiresearch buddies,

I'm going to run the first in a series of three wiki-research related technical talks tomorrow, starting at 1500 UTC (8am PDT).* I would love your help fielding questions from the audience during and after the talk!*

The talks are* focused on helping Wikimedians without tons of technical skills learn how to gather and manipulate Wikipedia data* using the MediaWiki API, the slave DBs on WMFLabs, and several other useful community-created tools. More information is here http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/07/11/how-to-research-beyond-wikimetrics/. You will be able to view the presentation here https://plus.google.com/events/ccmjivinemvg2brae5db9b3jsqk.

There are about 30 people signed up to watch the presentation as of now. Because of the format (streaming video + a buggy and often delayed Q&A feed), there won't be much opportunity for people get help or get their questions answered by me during the talk.

So *I plan to point people who have questions or need other help during and after my talk to wiki-research-l.* I will also point them to the #wikimedia-research channel on Freenode IRC http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikimedia-research.

*Implications for wiki-research-l:* Questions may hit this list any time during or after my talk. There is no obligation to answer, but if someone asks a question and you think you might be able to help, it would be awesome of you could do so :)

*Implications for #wikimedia-research:* Some people may start asking questions on IRC during the talk. Others may show up later (if they are having trouble creating the Labs account, or stuck on a query, etc). If you're a regular IRC user and are free at that time, it would be great if you could hang out in the chan during my talk. There may be no questions at all, but it never hurts to have someone there! If you are generally interested in helping newbies with research, you might want to make #wikimedia-research one of the IRC chans that you auto-join when you log in.

Cheers, Jonathan