Wikimedia Research/Projects

Who adds value to Wikipedia

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Analyze historical data to quantify value added to Wikimedia projects
 * WMF collaborations: Analytics Dev
 * External collaborations:

Contributor merit experimentation

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Design experiments to study how indicators of contributor merit/value added affects their motivation (WikiCredit)
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations:

Fundraising research

 * Lead: Ellery Wulczyn
 * Goal: Design and improve the experimental methodology for the online fundraiser
 * WMF collaborations: Fundraising
 * External collaborations:

Article recommendation experiments

 * Lead: Leila Zia
 * Goal: Identify gaps in content and design recommendation systems to fill them
 * WMF collaborations: Editing team (CX)
 * External collaborations: Bob West (Stanford)

Improving access to content

 * Lead: Leila Zia
 * Goal: Identify bottlenecks in navigation and design recommendation systems to optimize the reader experience
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations: Bob West (Stanford)

Wikistats maintenance

 * Lead: Erik Zachte
 * Goal: Maintain through the end of the calendar year the legacy reporting infrastructure for Wikimedia metrics
 * WMF collaborations: Analytics Dev
 * External collaborations:

Research consulting

 * Lead: Dario Taraborelli
 * Goal: Provide ad hoc research support to other teams at WMF
 * WMF collaborations: WMF at large
 * External collaborations:

Research collaborations

 * Lead: Dario Taraborelli
 * Goal: Handle external research collaborations, academic outreach effort, incoming research requests
 * WMF collaborations: Legal
 * External collaborations:

Research management

 * Lead: Dario Taraborelli
 * Goal: Team management-related tasks
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations:

Data releases and API prototypes

 * Lead: Dario Taraborelli
 * Goal: Handle the release of curated datasets and work with engineers on spinning up new APIs (except when already covered under different projects)
 * WMF collaborations: Legal; Analytics Dev
 * External collaborations

State of the User (REFLEX / Benchmarking)

 * Lead: Abbey Ripstra
 * Goal: Benchmarking a hand full of tasks per persona (user type) to evaluate the user experience and ability of users to complete those tasks in production code.
 * WMF collaborations: WMF product teams
 * External collaborations:

Deep Dive (Design Ethnography / Contextual Inquiry)

 * Lead: Abbey Ripstra
 * Goal: Gain knowledge about far flung users (informing personas) of wiki projects, their contexts (around knowledge, technology, access) and what they need to be successful in contributing to and gathering knowledge from Wikimedia projects.
 * WMF collaborations: Communications, product teams, Community Engagement
 * External collaborations: TBD

Persona Research

 * Lead: Abbey Ripstra
 * Goal: Research our users to inform a solid and inclusive set of robust personas. Currently we have "pragmatic personas" which are our best guess at personas reflecting our users from what we know - and being honest about what we do not know. This persona research will allow us to better gain knowledge about the user we do not currently know enough about.
 * WMF collaborations: Communications, product teams, Community Engagement

Visual Editor experimentation

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Design, implement, and communicate a robust experimental strategy for the Visual Editor rollout
 * WMF collaborations: Editing team
 * External collaborations:

Newcomer motivation prediction

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Predict the new contributors' motivation to route them to the appropriate onboarding/socialization flow
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations:

Editor-role based task routing

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Identify roles needed for each article and design an automated recruitment workflow
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations:

Newcomer onboarding experimentation

 * Lead: Aaron Halfaker
 * Goal: Experiment with different onboarding/socialization flows for newbies
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations:

Geo-aggregation of traffic and contribution data

 * Lead: Dario Taraborelli
 * Goal: Design an anonymization/aggregation strategy and release geodumps of traffic and contribution data
 * WMF collaborations:
 * External collaborations: Reid Priedhorsky (Los Alamos); Mark Graham (Oxford), Shilad Sen (Macalester)