Hi all,

Summary: You can read Research Report No 1 which is an overview of what the Research team [1] at Wikimedia Foundation has been busy with in the past six months and what's ahead of us at https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html . You can even do cmd/ctrl+p and download the report as pdf. I have signed up to send out this report twice a year, in December and June.

==Purpose== Communicating in written with you on a biannual basis about what we are working on and what's in our minds when it comes to research on or about Wikimedia projects.

==Motivation== * We receive emails from those of you in the community and external researchers asking about what we're working on now and what's ahead of us in the next 6 months to a year. I read this as there is a need for better/more communication about what we do.

* We do write grant reports for organizations who give grants to Wikimedia Foundation. I have now been involved in a few of them for our team and I see them as really nice summaries of what's going on in a team and what's ahead. I felt it's a loss to not tell a similar story to the public. I talked with Jonathan Curiel, Senior Development Communications Manager at Wikimedia Foundation, and he was up for doing this together.

==Scope== The focus is on our team, what's in our minds, what we do, and some of the important trends or events we're part of or we think we should be aware of. The report has a narrow scope compared to the wealth of work that is being done in the Wikimedia Movement. For a broader scope, I continue to recommend efforts such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter .

Last but not least: this is an experiment. I am committed to do it for a few times and we assess the usefulness of it then. If you have feedback, please let me know. (I will be out of office for a good part of the holidays ahead. If you don't hear back from me immediately, I will come back to you in the second week of January.)

Best, Leila

[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html

-- Leila Zia Head of Research Wikimedia Foundation