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 task T316790.)

TODO: List expected knowledge

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.)

TODO: Define early stage more clearly.

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.

Module 0. Welcome

Motivation, welcome message and orientation/administrative notes about the course goes here.

Module 1. Introduction to the Wikimedia projects

The primary focus of this module is to support the researcher in orienting. The distributed multilingual aspect of the WM projected along with many of the principles the projects operate based on make the environment potentially very complex for a newcomer research to grasp and work with.

Potential learning goals:

• A basic knowledge of what the Wikimedia projects are (with a particular focus on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource)
• A basic understanding of formal and informal roles on the Wikimedia projects
• Basic understanding of the main mechanisms through which WP or some of the other WM projects operate: RFCs and other modes of conflict resolution.
• Learn about UCoC
• Basic statistics
• Learn about the values, pillars, relevant policies, and gain a sense of appreciation for the complexity at play.

Module 2. 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

Module 3. Data and Technology Infrastructure

The purpose of this module is to introduce the researcher to the data sources and technological infrastructure available for them to conduct research on the WM projects.

Note: The Research team has developed a list of potential learning goals and capabilities for this module. Under review.

potential learning goals:

what the course participants can do after taking this module:

Module 4. Ethics of research on the Wikimedia projects

This module introduces the researcher to the ethics of conducting research on the WM projects, including relevant policies they should be aware of.

Potential learning goals:

tbd

Module 5. 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.

Module 6. Closing and next steps

This is the final module where we can provide a summary of what the researcher has learned and guide them to resources to stay connected with the WM research. (e.g., meta:Research, Wiki Workshop, wiki-research-l, ...)