Wikimedia Research

Welcome to the home of Wikimedia Research.

Mandate
We are a team of scientists and UX researchers at the Wikimedia Foundation using data to understand and empower millions of users – readers, contributors, and donors – who interact with Wikipedia and its sister projects on a daily basis. We turn research questions into publicly shared knowledge, we design and test new technology, we produce data-driven insights to support product and engineering decisions and we publish research informing the organization’s and the movement’s strategy. We are strongly committed to principles of transparency, privacy and collaboration, we use free and open source technology and we collaborate with researchers in the industry and academia. Wikimedia Research brings together Design Research (formerly part of UX) and Research and Data (formerly part of Analytics).

Top departmental priorities
These are our current priorities for the 2015-16 fiscal year.

Projects
We're building a comprehensive list of projects driven or supported by Wikimedia Research. Our work is publicly tracked on Phabricator: check out the following boards to see what each team is up to:

Our goals are captured on a quarterly basis for each fiscal year (Q1: July-September; Q2: October-December; Q3: January-March; Q4: April-June). You can filter our workboard for tasks related to each team's goals using these tags:
 * Research & Data:
 * Design Research: tba

How we use Phabricator: Research & Data

Collaborations
We collaborate with external researchers in a variety of forms. You can read more on formal collaborations on this page.

Resources

 * Our research reports mostly live in the Research namespace on Meta
 * We host every month a showcase where we present publicly our work. We occasionally invite guest speakers involved in Wikimedia research. You can browse past editions of the showcase on this page. The showcase has been running monthly since December 2013.
 * If you're interested in staying on top of both internal and external research on our projects, check out our monthly newsletter (which you can also subscribe to by mail) or follow @WikiResearch on Twitter. The newsletter is mostly volunteer effort coordinated by Tilman and Dario and has been proudly running since April 2011.
 * You can reach us on IRC via the irc:wikimedia-research channel or drop us a line ( for Design Research, for Research & Data and the research group as a whole).