[ Please feel free to forward this on to any other people or lists you
think might be interested! ]
Greetings Fellow Wiki Researchers!
Along with fellow Wikimedians Jonathan Morgan and Frances Hocutt (and
many others), I am helping run three and a half day-long workshops in
November for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and
data science tools to ask and answer questions about online
communities with a strong focus on doing research on Wikipedia. This
will be a new and improved version of the workshops we ran
successfully earlier this year.
You will need to be in Seattle to participate or volunteer in our
workshops. That said, you can /totally/ build on our curriculum to run
your own workshops. One group in Waterloo already has! Details on how
to do that are online (
http://mako.cc/go/03) and we'd be happy to
help!
If you /are/ in Seattle...
The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience
and will be free of charge and open to anyone.
Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able
to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and
graphical visualizations to answer questions like:
- Are new contributors to an article in Wikipedia sticking around
longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?
- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular
Twitter hashtag?
- Are people who participated in a Wikipedia outreach event staying
involved? How do they compare to people that joined the project
outside of the event?
Details and dates are online here:
http://networkcollectiv.es/2014/10/16/cdsw-november-2014/
If you are interested in participating, fill out our registration at
the link above before October 30th.
If you already know how to program in Python, it would be really
awesome if you would volunteer as a mentor! Being a mentor will
involve working with participants and talking them through the
challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is
required. If you’re interested, send me an email.
Regards,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto