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.


 * ability to source information and learn: we will not be able to teach all the skills that every participant needs to be able to successfully contribute to the Wikimedia projects. (For example, we may be able to cover a piece of infrastructure such as PAWS, but the applicant needs to learn SQL through other means.)

Learning goals
At a high level the course intends to support the researchers in common research workflows with the lens of Wikimedia projects. There are two primary groups that the course intends to serve:

Group 1. Researchers who have a Wikimedia related research question and are looking for ways to answer them.

Group 2. Researchers who want to contribute their research expertise to the Wikimedia projects but do not have a specific research question defined.

Group 1 researchers will learn:


 * how to develop impactful research questions
 * where to find the data they need. There are 3 scenarios to learn here: (private or public) data already exists and is ready to be processed, data needs to be collected (gadgets, interviews, banners, etc.), data exists in theory but needs substantial processing (infrastructure).
 * where to process and analyze the data? (infrastructure)
 * where to seek help while conducting research
 * where and how to share results, disseminate, and increase the impact of the research (publications, tools/gadgets, production code ...)
 * the fundamentals of the Wikimedia projects (welcome: ethos, working, ethics, privacy, OA policy, history (?), connections of a few of the projects)

Group 2 researchers will learn:


 * everything that group 1 researchers learn
 * essential skills to define impactful research questions
 * the state of some of the existing and active areas of research on the Wikimedia projects and open questions

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 and Open

Why:


 * Free and Open are fundamental pillars of the Wikimedia projects. A basic understanding of these concepts allows the researchers to navigate the WM space more effectively.
 * An opportunity to strengthen these concepts on the Web by introducing more researchers to them.

potential learning goals:


 * (theory) Understand the philosophy of free licenses and why they are important (in academia/research)
 * (theory) Understand the scientific value of conducting research in the open
 * (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:


 * tbd

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.