[Moving the WMF internal lists to Bcc. Adding wiki-research-l, the public mailing list for research related questions.]

Hi Ritvik,

Thank you for reaching out to us and your interest to do research with the Wikimedia projects' data. I'm particularly excited to read that you are already thinking about giving back to the commons by data, knowledge, and insights. We love that. :)

Regarding the specific data that you wrote about:

* Our team, Research, is responsible for setting up Formal Collaborations that allow the type of research that you mention in your email. At this time, we are only able to prioritize and initiate formal collaborations that are in-line with our annual plan commitments and I expect that to stay the same in the coming 8 months. I'm sorry that we can't explore together a formal collaboration at this point.

* However, thanks to the nudges by some folks from the research community and this list, we took steps to find a pathway to share some of Wikipedia's COVID-19 related data with the research community. While the decision about what to publish is not finalized, I do expect to see a geographical dimension associated with pageviews as part of the release (the granularity of which is to be determined).

You can read more about the details of the data that we are currently keeping at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_retention_guidelines#Exceptions_to_thes... .

I am sorry that we cannot have a fast turnaround for your request. I do believe, however, that by reserving more time to work on the question of how to release the data publicly, we can unlock more research and also provide a more equitable path for this highly important dataset and many key research questions that can be answered with it.

Best, Leila

-- Leila Zia Head of Research Wikimedia Foundation

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 7:34 AM Ramakrishnan, Ritvik ritvik.ramakrishnan@gatech.edu wrote:

Good Morning,

Hope all is going well! My name is Ritvik Ramakrishnan and I am a Research Assistant at Harvard University. I have CC’d a Postdoctoral Researcher from Harvard, Dr. Tao Hu, in this email.

Currently, we are looking at Wikipedia view counts to analyze the trends between that and COVID-19 growth in the United States. However, the Wikipedia view counts available using the Wikimedia Rest API Documentation made it difficult for us to geolocate and filter it to just the United States. The view count numbers we have aren’t confined to a location.

Because of this, after talking to Italy researchers who had conducted a similar study for the Zika Virus using Wikipedia data confined to the United States, they suggested we reach out to Wikimedia Foundation to establish a non-disclosure agreement as part of your formal collaboration policy.

Since we want to be able to look at view counts per day by location, in return we can provide cutting-edge data and information that your foundation can possibly release the data we used for our study once we are accepted for publication.

Let me know what next steps we can take in order to proceed. Thank you!

Warm Regards, Ritvik Ramakrishnan _______________________________________________ Research-Internal mailing list Research-Internal@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/research-internal