Wikimedia Research/Office hours

The office hours are a public forum jointly organized by Research and Analytics to make ourselves more available to answer some of the research and analytics questions that you as Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates' staff, and researchers face in your projects and initiatives.

We meet every fourth Wednesday on the #wikimedia-research channel on IRC (see below for how to attend). Starting in June 2020 we experiment with alternating time-slots to provide different options for participations and accomodate a wider range of timezones -- therefore, please check the upcoming events for the next meeting times.

The monthly office hours started in January 2020 as an experiment initially for a period of 6 months after which we will assess whether to continue it or not. We would be glad to hear your feedback and/or comments on the talk-page.

Scope
We encourage you to attend the office hour if you have research related questions. These can be questions abour our teams, our projects, or more importantly questions about your projects or ideas that we can support you with during the office hours. You can also ask us questions about how to use a specific dataset available to you to answer a question you have, or some other question. Note that the purpose of the office hours is to answer your questions during the dedicated time of the office hour. Questions that may require many hours of back-and-forth between our team and you are not suited for this forum. For these bigger questions, however, we are happy to brainstorm with you in the office hour and point you to some good directions to explore further on your own (and maybe come back in the next office hour and ask more questions).

How to attend
You can join and participate in our IRC channel on freenode:. If you are new to IRC, we suggest you use the following approach to connect:


 * Go to Freenode Webchat
 * Choose a nickname for yourself (this can be your real name or not)
 * Type #wikimedia-research in the Channel box.
 * Click Start and you are now in the correct chatroom.

If you miss the office hour, you can read the logs.

Announcements will be made over the following places, so subscribe to them if you want to receive the latest updates:


 * wiki-research-l mailing list


 * analytics mailing list


 * wikidata mailing list

Next meeting
The next office hour will take place on

* Wednesday, June 24, 2020, 9.00-10.00 (UTC)

Find your time zone

Link to Etherpad with notes and possibility to add items to the agenda.

Interaction
If you would like to ask a question, simply type in the chat. Everyone will do their best to answer as quickly as possible.

If you would like answer others' questions, that is great. We encourage you to take advantage of "/me" - statements, For example, if User2 types User2 is working on a response to the question asked by User1
 *  /me is working on a response to the question asked by User1
 * it will appear as
 * This is not only important to provide feedback to the one asking that the question is not ignored, but also for others to potentially wait for your response in order to avoid duplicating answers.

Past events

 * Wednesday, May 27, 2020, 18.00-19.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 18.00-19.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)
 * Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 1700-18.00 (UTC)