All,
these are highlights from a session the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research & Data
team hosted at CSCW ’14 in Baltimore. The audience was a group of researchers
either working on Wikipedia/Wikimedia-related research projects or interested
in learning about opportunities to collaborate with the Foundation.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions/comments.
Contact
Dario Taraborelli - [email protected]
Aaron Halfaker - [email protected]
Jonathan Morgan - [email protected]
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-research (webclient)
Mailing list: wiki-research-l (mailing list)
Resources
We gave a short overview of existing resources of potential interest to
Wikipedia/Wikimedia researchers:
OAuth allows 3rd-party software to edit Wikipedia on behalf of a Wikipedia
editor and it’s a (mostly untapped) opportunity to run experimental research or
test new interfaces targeted at Wikipedians. See:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OAuth#Using_OAuth
Data portal summarizes data sources that are currently available to researchers
and app developers. See: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data
Wikimedia Research Newsletter: A monthly overview reviewing or summarizing
recent research (contributions are welcome, please contact Dario if you’re
interested in contributing) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter
Subject recruitment. Aaron and Dario have managed a process for documenting and
vetting subject recruitment occurring on Wikimedia projects. This process was
set in place to help resolve the tension between researchers’ need to recruit
subjects and editors’ desire to not be bothered. The process involves a public
discussion and mentorship in order to ensure that proposed studies that affect
editors are well documented, are addressing original questions and do not
result in unnecessary disruption of wiki work. This is a service we’ve been
providing on a volunteer basis as members of the Research Committee, it’s meant
to offer support to researchers but doesn’t eliminate the risk that an account
used for recruitment purposes might be blocked by an administrator.
IRBs and minors. One of the issues that we discussed is dealing with IRB &
other ethics boards’ requirements when studies may result in interaction with
minors. Aaron <[email protected]> is willing to discuss the issue with
researchers and university staff upon request.
Annual survey modules. Interest was expressed in exploring strategies for
expanding the annual editor/reader survey with new questions contributed by
researchers. At this point (March 2014) we cannot commit to any such project,
but in general there is potential for cooperations between WMF and academic
researchers in this area. Interested parties should contact Tilman Bayer
(tbayer at wikimedia dot org) who has been conducting the last WMF editor
survey and can provide information about these surveys (methodology, results,
available data etc.) and their calendar.
WikiResearch Workshop at CSCW 2015. We discussed planning a workshop for CSCW
next year. Anyone who is interested in collaborating, please contact us.
Details are TBD, but our general goals include:
increase awareness of the public data resources that are available
highlight research areas that are ripe for investigation, esp. where WMF could
benefit from the results
get a better sense of what kind of data resources (and/or what data formats)
researchers would like to have
brainstorm a (lightweight, ethical, practical) model for partnership between
WMF and academic research orgs that want access to certain non-public data
Wiki Research Hackathons. On Nov. 9th, 2013, we held our first global research
hackathon (announcement). We had universities and other local meetups from
around the world connect via Google Hangout to share ideas, data and
presentations geared toward datasets, code and other resources. We’ll be
planning another hackathon in the coming months. You can help by hosting or
attending your own local event. Please contact us if you’re interested.
Public listing on WMF’s strategic research questions. We discussed the
potential for the Wikimedia Foundation to list out key areas of research that
we are interested in. This is something we are keenly interested in and you
should expect to hear from us soon through wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch.
Tweet @WikiResearch. We maintain a relatively high-visibility twitter account
from which we tweet about new research, data, and other initiatives. If you
tweet about your own wiki-related work @WikiResearch, we will retweet it so
long as it’s relevant. We will also experiment with the use of this Twitter
handle to increase the visibility of libraries and analytics tools to support
Wikipedia research.
Internships/grad student residencies. We talked briefly about research
collaborations, internships and other forms of work opportunities at WMF.
We’re actively exploring possibilities and will broadcast details through
wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch when we know more.
We’re hiring. We are looking to expand the research team at WMF, if you are
interested in working with us keep an eye on wiki-research-l and @WikiResearch
for job openings or contact us off-list.
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