[Foundation-l] Summary of findings from WMF Summer of Research program now available

[Steven Walling]

Greetings everyone,

Now that the the WMF summer research program in the Community Department has
come to a close, I wanted to point interested parties to the body of
findings we've produced.

We covered a lot of territory so to save you the trouble if you just want to
browse, we collected our most salient results into one wiki page.

   - Relevant blog post here:
   http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/06/summer-research-findings/


   - Summary of findings on Meta, with links to further documentation:
   https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/Summary_of_Findings

Next steps are twofold for this program:

   1. We'll be working with the Global Development team and some volunteers
   from the local community to extend these analyses to cover Portuguese
   Wikipedia, specifically to support Global Dev's work in Brazil.
   2. We're choosing and implementing a platform to release not just our
   code, but the datasets we compiled over the summer. You'll hear more about
   this soon, but we're taking our time in order to decide on a solution that
   will work in the long term for sharing open data beyond the dumps.

Last but not least, if anyone would like to have a more in-depth discussion
about these findings and the research that produced them, I'm definitely
open to hosting an IRC office hours with some members of the team. Just let
me know if you're interested (on or offlist) and I'll set something up soon.

-- 
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org