The Wikimedia Research Committee [1] is currently considering a major overhaul of the research section on Meta-Wiki:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/2011_overhaul
The practical reason to start this process is to clean up and streamline pages used by the Wikimedia community and by the Foundation to document internal research projects and policies. The ambitious goal it to make Meta:Research the main hub where all research on Wikimedia projects (be it internal or external) is discussed, reviewed and tracked. The objectives we are hoping to achieve in the short term with this project are the following:
make it easy for researchers to find the resources and WMF support they are looking for
bring as much transparency as possible to research involving the Wikimedia community, by reducing attrition between the community and researchers and making sure research is not disruptive of editor activity
design a scheme of incentives to increase researcher participation and to increase the number of projects included in the Wikimedia research directory
design a series of incentives to nudge researchers towards releasing their datasets under an open license and publishing/self-archiving their research results via open access outlets/repositories.
Our long-term vision aims to:
provide support to the publication of research data on Wikimedia projects via a unified open data infrastructure [2]
integrate structured bibliographic data into Meta:Research via whatever solution the community decides to adopt [3]
Many on this list are already actively involved in editing and maintaining Meta research pages. Your feedback and suggestions on this project would be very valuable.
Dario
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee
[2] We are currently reviewing a number of solutions to set up a central repository of open research data: http://bit.ly/OpenDataPlatforms
[3] See the long discussion started on this list with this thread: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2011-March/001361.html
--
Dario Taraborelli, PhD
Senior Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://nitens.org/taraborelli
Hi, everyone!
In the meeting yesterday, it was suggested that this meeting be held on a
reoccurring basis, possibly once every two months. Here are some possible
reoccurring times, let me know off-list which, if any, of the times would
work for you, and I'll email the list afterwards with the best time.
Last Thursday of every two months: 10:00AM PST, 11:00AM PST, 12:00PM PST
(starting with June 30)
First Friday of every two months: 10:00AM PST, 11:00AM PST, 12:00PM PST
(starting with July 1)
First Monday of every two months: 10:00AM PST, 11:00AM PST, 12:00PM PST
(starting with July 4)
Thanks for everyone being patient with the technical difficulties yesterday,
I'll set up a Webex conference call for the next meeting (and make sure I
have backup phone numbers for everyone who plans to attend).
Thanks!
Dana
--
Dana Isokawa
Assistant to the Office of the Executive and Deputy Directors
+1 415 839 6885 ext 6689
www.wikimedia.org
Dear all,
as I noted during the RCom meeting, we recently put on hold a request for subject recruitment after we noticed that a researcher was trying to contact a large number of editors via email feedback.
The person involved in this study was in good faith and he agreed to create a page documenting the purpose, scope and recruitment method for his research. To help support this request, I'd like to ask you that you send your comments on the talk page of this proposal by Monday at the latest so we can follow up with the researcher. If there are major concerns or issues with the proposed method I'll relay the request for review to the research community list.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects/Participatory_Motivation_t…
Thanks
Dario
New survey link posted by a UW student from a group that has done good
Wikipedia studies before. Invitations to participate were posted on the
English Wikipedia RfA Talk page and the Village Pump, so just wanted to give
RCom a heads up...
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Avdelamerced
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
During our meeting I remembered that one my friend could be interesting
addition to RCom. He already worked with me on the Wikimedia research
issues two years ago [1]. Basically, this page [2] and its subpages are
the product of our work. The edits are mostly mine, but significant part
of the work is his, too.
So, I talked with him and asked him to write something about himself to
present himself to other RCom members [3].
I would add that he has initiative and that he would help us to be
better organized, too.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Goranmilovanovic
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Millosh/Wikimedia_research
[3] Goran S. Milovanović is a PhD student at the Department of
Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. He started
his PhD program at New York University, Cognition and Perception, where
he took his first two years of PhD studies. He is currently working on
his PhD thesis focused on problems of rationality of cognition at the
Belgrade University.
Goran has been involved in Internet related research since 2002, when he
founded the Center for Research on Information Technologies (CePIT,
http://www.bos.rs/cepit/eng/) in Belgrade. He co-authored and edited
five books on Internet research in Serbian. Since 2002. he was involved
in various Internet and Information Governance related research,
including Internet Governance studies such as "Internet Governance
Forum: Identifying the Impact" (http://www.diplomacy.edu/ig/impact/)
with DiploFoundation (http://www.diplomacy.edu). He has worked as
Research Coordinator and Research Manager with DiploFoundation
(http://www.diplomacy.edu), Web Manager with Ebart
(http://www.arhiv.rs/) in Belgrade and as a Consultant on research
projects with UNICEF. More information is available from
http://www.milovanovicresearch.com or Google: Goran S. Milovanovic. He
was born in 1974. in Belgrade, Serbia.
I created a new IRC channel on freenode for real-time discussions between RCom members and the community and to coordinate work within RCom without the need of skype.
You'll find me idling there during office hours (9.30am-6pm Pacific time) and occasionally later at night.
irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-rcom
If you wish to join but are not familiar with IRC, check out this page for instructions: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC
Once we have a decent number of people regularly idling in this channel we can advertise it on the lists to provide quasi-rt support to external researchers.
Dario
Thanks everybody for your response. Based on the results of the poll and some further email exchange, I confirm the next RCom Meeting will take place on:
Thursday May 19 at 12pm PDT
http://bit.ly/RCom_4
Further details and a link to the agenda will follow. I look forward to talking to you all.
Dario