[Foundation-l] Research team meeting report

[Erik Moeller]

The first meeting of the Research Team on Sunday, June 6 focused on 
defining its mission and planning some of the tasks to come. 25 people 
attended and participated. Essentially, we agreed that the Team would be 
a network of special interest groups focused on particular issues such as:
* Wikimedia sociology
* MediaWiki development tasks
* Content analysis

Members of the Team are also encouraged to keep abreast of activities 
outside their own work, and to participate in high priority projects.

Some general work that has been started:
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_projects has been created to 
collect ideas for worthwhile projects. Two specific ideas, a user survey 
and a distributed quality comparison of Wikipedia with other 
encyclopedias, have been proposed.
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team/Interests lists 
members of the team by interests; if you are a member and you haven't 
checked your interests here yet, please do so.

The following have been suggested as high priority tasks:
* Reorganize and update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks 
(I will personally begin to work on this soon). It has not yet been 
finalized to what extent we will use Bugzilla, but we will try not to 
add information to it that would increase the workload of the developers.
* Organize community meetings (Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikisource etc.) to 
better determine what every community's specific needs are.
* Improve communications within the Team (possibly make use of 
wikiresearch-l, or a new mailing list specifically for logistics).
* Specifically, work on the GUI and workflows for single login migration 
to assist Brion with the implementation.

Please contact me or comment on the [[m:Wikimedia Research Team]] talk 
page if you want to help with any of these tasks but don't know how yet.

Besides these issues, many specific features and ideas were discussed 
during and after the meeting.

The next meeting will likely happen on June 18 or June 19; the specific 
date is being decided on: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team#Next_meeting

I will try to organize the next meeting specifically so that smaller 
groups can work on separate issues. I also want to bring peer review and 
article validation into the debate at that point.

Read the full log at:
http://scireview.de/wiki/research/channel.log

Join the team at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Team

On a related note, I've proposed to change the name from "Team" to 
"Network". Please comment on 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Research_Team about this 
suggestion.

Best regards,

Erik Möller
Chief Research Officer