Wikimedia Research/Course

We are aiming to develop a course that can help those who are interested in conducting research on the Wikimedia projects to learn the basics needed to successfully and joyfully contribute their research expertise to the Wikimedia projects. This course is part of the Research team's strategy and vision to nurture the Wikimedia research communities.

Audience
The primary audience of the course are early stage researchers who have basic proficiency of English as a language and are interested in conducting research to improve the Wikimedia projects. (To learn more about the iterations that resulted in this decision, read .)

in discussions with the team, we identified a need for specifying what knowledge the primary audience is expected to have. After further discussions we concluded that we will develop the modules as a next step, and based on the content of the modules determine a list of expected knowledge for each module. The list of expected knowledge can be presented to the audience at the course level (beyond the module level) as well.

Modules
The course will have multiple modules. While some modules may be prerequisite for others, not all have to be. In fact we expect that some participants will be interested to only learn from some of the modules and not necessarily all.

A placeholder module
After some conversations with the Research and Legal teams, we're introducing a placeholder module for now. The module can be on the topic of "Wikimedia governance and community model" or "Open research" or some other umbrella topic. We expect the Free License topic to be covered as one or more sessions as part of this broader module.

Free licenses

potential learning goals:


 * (theory) Understand the philosophy of free licenses and why they are important (in academia/research)
 * (practice) Guidance on how to use free licenses (licensing data-sets, code, articles, ... understanding the intersection with copyright, WMF OA Policy)

what the course participants can do after taking this module:


 * tba

Data and technology infrastructure
The Research team is currently developing a list of potential learning goals and capabilities for this module.

potential learning goals:



what the course participants can do after taking this module:



Ethics of research on the Wikimedia projects
tbd

Open research directions and questions
At a high level, in this module we can introduce different research fields/directions that the participants can embark on. We can also surface some of the pointers for the audience to access open research questions. This module is a good place to involve expert researchers in different fields of Wikimedia research to contribute building sessions.