Hi all,

The Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation has officially started a new Formal Collaboration [1] with Dr. Michael Zimmer (Marquette University) to work collaboratively on Wikimedia Research Best Practices Around Privacy White Paper [2]. We prioritized responding to this request from the Arbitration Committee [3] as part of our mission to strengthen Wikimedia research communities and to support the policy (broadly defined) needs of the Wikimedia Movement.[4]

Here are a few pieces of information about this collaboration that we would like to share with you:

* We aim to keep the research documentation for this project in the corresponding research page on meta.[2] Please note the link on that project page to the Phabricator task, which contains additional details and timeline information.

* Research tasks are hard to break down and track in task-tracking systems. This being said, the page on meta is linked to an Epic level Phabricator task and all tasks related to this project that can be captured on Phabricator will be captured there.[5]

* The following formal collaborator (cc-ed) will contribute to this project: Dr. Michael Zimmer, Marquette University.[6] We are thankful to them for agreeing to spend their time and expertise on this project, and to those of you who have already worked with us as we were shaping the proposal for this project and are planning to continue your contributions to this program.

* I act as the point of contact for this research in the Wikimedia Foundation. Please feel free to reach out to me (directly, if it cannot be shared publicly) if you have comments or questions about the project.

Best, Eli