Hi Leila,
I have read it, that's why I'm confused.
From: Leila Zia <lzia@wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2022 9:40 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; Discussion list for the Wikidata project. <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: [Wiki-research-l] Re: The Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations
 
Hi Galder,

Please see below.

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 12:26 PM Galder Gonzalez Larraņaga
<galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Leila, for answering the question raised.

Anytime.

> I'm a bit confused with this, I supposed that the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award was an initiative from the Research team of the WMF (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research), but I read in your answer that "WikiResearch is primarily in English and about research published in English". I understand that the main working language of the WMF is English, as this mailing list is, but I would assume that an Award promoted by the WMF should be multilingual.

Sorry. Let me clarify. What I was referring to when I used
WikiResearch in my email was the WikiResearch twitter account:
https://twitter.com/WikiResearch . I did not intend to refer to the
WMF Research team or Wikimedia Research community. And to repeat: this
is one source we use to find research done on the Wikimedia projects.
There are other sources as I mentioned in my response.

> Me, as a Basque Wikimedians User Group member, I promote Wikimedia activities in Basque language, because that is our goal. But the WMF is not the English Wikimedians User Group, as far as I understand. Our designated lingua franca may be English, but the WMF can't exclude research that is not made in this language from an Award. I would understand if the (non-existing) English Wikimedians User Group created the "EWUG Research in English Award of the Year", but is not the case.

I understand and acknowledge your point about inclusion. I hope some
of the points I shared about our existing process in my other email
can help you find possible solutions we can consider doing. :) On my
end: I have a todo to come back to you all.

Best,
Leila

> Cheers,
>
> Galder
>
> ________________________________
> From: Leila Zia <lzia@wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 10, 2022 8:04 PM
> To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; Discussion list for the Wikidata project. <wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: [Wiki-research-l] Re: The Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations
>
> Hi all, Thank you for your feedback. I take your comments as a sign of
> genuine care and I'm happy to engage and learn with you how we can do
> better. (Note: I'm responding to all lists, though some of the
> feedback has been sent only to wikimedia-l.)
>
> * Galder, Gereon, Xavier, Gnangarra, and Andy: thank you for your feedback.
>
> * Andy, I'll respond to your comment first. We do not require the work
> to be published under a free license for us to consider it for the
> award. However, if the work is shortlisted, we reach out to the
> authors, tell them that it's shortlisted, and it can be considered for
> the award if the work is at least made publicly available. At that
> point, we also encourage the authors to publish under a free license
> and share with them a few ways they may be able to (even if the work
> is published somewhere already with restrictions). The issue of
> licenses is on top of our mind and we actively look for ways to push
> for more Wikimedia research work to be published under free licenses.
>
> * I am going to share with you some of my thoughts, and a possible
> improvement we can make in the process.
>
> ** Let's try to keep things simple to be able to improve things
> together. This is not a case of "WMF did x". The idea of the award was
> created in the Research team, and both last year and this year, we've
> been grateful to have the support of researchers outside of WMF for
> it. (Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University), and Benjamin Mako Hill (U.
> of Washington)). I take full responsibility for the execution of the
> award and I can take your feedback and see where we can improve the
> process. :)
>
> ** In order to be able to improve the process, I should share more
> details about how we do the search for the publications first. We have
> multiple sources for searching for research published in a given year:
> 1. The nomination process we shared on this thread.
> 2. Research publications shared in WikiResearch twitter account.
> 3. External research search engines and repositories for different
> fields: we use scholar.google.com, dblp.org and more.
>
> To give you a sense of the distribution of scholarly publications we
> identified last year from each of the above sources: 11 nominations
> and 170+ research publications through the twitter account and
> external searches. The award chairs (2 people; this year it is going
> to be Mako and I) reviewed all identified publications. We discussed
> every publication at varying depth depending on the result of our
> initial reviews.
>
> ** Knowing the process, there are at least a few ways I think the
> process must be improved. I'm sure now that you see more you can
> critique even more. :) I proactively share with you some of them here:
> ::* I need to have an easychair account to nominate. That can/must
> change (but to what? we want these nominations to be private, and we
> need a way to be able to process them efficiently because we're only 2
> people. We are considering openreview.net for the future years because
> they're open source; but they still have other limitations. For this
> year, easychair it is.).
> ::* We need more people on the committee: both for workload sharing,
> and also including more perspectives. (This is /a lot/ to ask of
> researchers. I'm grateful that Mako and Aaron have supported us in the
> past.)
> ::* We need other non-English sources to source community research.
> (WikiResearch is primarily in English and about research published in
> English.)
> ::* The shared language of reviewers is assumed to be English. If we
> are going to at scale consider other languages, then we need a way
> that this group of people can converse on academic topics with one
> another without having to share a language.
>
> ** I also understand the reality of the resources available to me and
> our team. I understand the importance of working on multiple fronts
> with regards to the research community (Wikimedia Research Funds, Wiki
> Workshop, global research competitions, research showcases, monthly
> office hours, talks and presentations, formal collaborations, and
> more). I believe in the importance of motivation (and we have seen a
> very good momentum around the award idea from last year's run). We
> need to do many things, with very limited resources; Our values and
> ideals are important and we have to attempt to hold them all as we
> make decisions. In practice, sometimes we can't meet all the ambitions
> we have. We need to make trade-offs. What is important is to be aware,
> to listen, to try to improve, and to be honest.
>
> I will leave you with the above and I commit to talk with Mako to
> consider ways to open up the process for more languages to be included
> (in 2021 or in 2022+; I can't promise changes for the 2021 process.).
> One of us will write back here with what we decide to do.
>
> Thanks,
> Leila
>
> On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 5:42 AM Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 7 Jan 2022 at 19:48, Leila Zia <lzia@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> > > =Eligibility criteria=
> >
> > > * The publication must be available in English.
> >
> > I echo others' concerns about this.
> >
> > I'm equally concerned that, while WMF regard being in English as
> > essential for one of their awards, they do not regard the use of an
> > open licence as a requirement.
> >
> > --
> > Andy Mabbett
> > @pigsonthewing
> > https://pigsonthewing.org.uk
> > _______________________________________________
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