[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Research Network meeting today

Sat Jun 18 08:55:01 UTC 2005

The Wikimedia Research Network is a voluntary association of individuals 
interested in studying the content, communities and technology of the 
Wikimedia projects. It is free for anyone to join:

	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Network

Today, 20:00 UTC, the WRN will convene on IRC, on the channel

         #wikimedia-research
on

         irc.freenode.net

Unlike the first meeting, this one will focus on very specific issues. I
intend to split the channel very quickly into two main topic areas:

* MediaWiki (software) related research
* study of the Wikimedia content and the project communities.

If you've never used IRC before, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_instructions
for instructions. To convert UTC to your local timezone, go to:
http://worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_UTC.aspx

== Agenda ==

For the technical side (this may depend on certain individuals being
present):

* Single login: helping Brion with the implementation by providing GUI
mock-ups and workflows
* Standardized wiki syntax: Lee's proposal
( http://piclab.com/lee/index.php/Wiki_syntax_proposal )
* Wikiversity/Wikisophia: defining the project's technical requirements
* If there is interest:
** Wikinews, Wikicommons enhancements
** next generation discussion system
* Planning the first community meeting: Wikibooks
* anything on your mind

Ideas for the content/community side:
* organizing a community-wide survey
* evaluating the state of the article validation system (possible
feedback to tech team)
* increasing collaboration across projects (Wikimedia COTW and similar)
* sharing study results and pooling data
* anything on your mind

== Research tasks and topics ==

As discussed in the last meeting, we have updated the following pages:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research_Network/Interests
(Members of the WRN by topical interest)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research
(Research ideas and list of individuals doing research)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
(MediaWiki development tasks and specifications)

The latter two pages should become a major focus of attention for the
WRN over the coming months. They are the starting point to further,
project-specific pages. Please take a look and edit these pages as you
see fit. I would especially appreciate help with moving development
tasks from the "To do" section into the table (this requires classifying
and describing them, so only do that if you know what I mean with a
particular item ;-).

== Research mailing list ==

Specifically for the topic of *content* and *community* related
research, a new mailing list has been created:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Technical discussions should continue to take place on:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

There is not yet an organizational mailing list for the WRN itself; I
have requested permission to set this up.

All best,

Erik