Hi Benjamin,
My name is Leila and I'm in the Research team in Wikimedia Foundation.
Please see below.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 12:59 AM Benjamin Lees <emufarmers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The community has been working on copyright violation issues for a long
time.[2] There are probably ways the WMF could support improvements in
this area. Maybe the WMF could even design some system that would
magically solve the problem. But it's certainly not the community standing
in the way.
While I understand that you brought this up as one example within a
broader context and set of challenges, now that you have brought it
up, I'd like to ask you for a specific guidance. Can you help me
understand, in your view, what are some of the most pressing issues on
this front from the perspective of those who work to detect and
address copyright violations? (Not knowing a lot about this space, my
first thought is to have better algorithms to detect copyright
violations in Wikipedia (?) text (?) across many languages. Is this
the most pressing issue?)
Some more info about how we work at the end of this email.[4]
Best,
Leila
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Formal_collaborations
[4]
To give you some more information about the context I operate in:
* Part of the work of our team is to listen to community conversations
in lists such as wikimedia-l to find research questions/directions to
work on. If we can understand the problem space clearly and define
research questions bsaed on, we can work on priorities with the
corresponding communities and start the research on these questions
ourselves or through our Formal Collaborations program [3].
* The types of problems that we can work (relatively) more quickly on
are those for which the output can be an API, data-set, or knowledge.
* We won't start the research based on hearing the most pressing
issues from you. If we see that based on your response there is a
promising direction for further research, we will follow up (with the
corresponding parts of the community involved in this space) to learn
more about the general and specific problems.