Research talk:Newsletter

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"Wikipedia Revision Toolkit" dataset

Dear all, the inaugural edition of the research newsletter featured our ACL2011 paper "Wikipedia Revision Toolkit: Efficiently Accessing Wikipedia's Edit History." (thanks for that). We could provide a preprocessed database dump containing all articles and talk pages of the English WP (20110405) in the JWPL format and all revisions of these pages (as described in the paper). The size of the download would be 66GB. If you are interested in the data and would like to host it, please get in touch. Best, Oliver (ferschke@tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de) --Oliver.ferschke 12:03, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Great initative

Just wanted to say that. Keep up the good job! --Piotrus 07:51, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

+1. I like this newsletter :) -- Andrew Krizhanovsky 13:25, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Email subscription?

Is it possible to subscripe your newslatter? Syrcro 13:48, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Not yet, but we're working on that --DarTar 20:58, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

This is now available [1], although it's still somewhat experimental (I am not aware of any other HTML email newsletters run via Mailman on lists.wikimedia org - I hope we won't run into this kind of problem too often; it hasn't occurred in my tests so far).

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Some stats about the first year

For the brief presentation of the Research Newsletter in this Wikimania session, I gathered some numbers to update those from the blog post about Vol.1:

• The number of citations (roughly corresponding to the number of publications covered) in the six issues from January to June 2012: 117 (= 11 + 22 + 16 + 29 + 13 + 26). I.e. in its first year of existence, the WRN covered around 200 publications.
• Bylined contributors (i.e. not counting those who helped with copyediting etc.) from July 2011 to June 2012: 19 (Boghog, DarTar, Drdee, Hfordsa, Jodi.a.schneider, Junkie.dolphin, Lilaroja, Mietchen, Phoebe, Piotrus, Romanesco, Steven Walling, Tbayer, Njullien, Lambiam, Amir E. Aharoni, Protonk, Angelika Adam, Evan)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Zedler Award in the German Wikipedia

Congratulations!

Hi, and hello and congratulations. A member of the German Wikipedia commuity nominated you for the Zedler Award 2014 of Wikimedia Deutschland. -- Dirk Franke (WMDE) (talk) 10:39, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Italian research and paywalled papers

In the unlikely event of some research appearing in Italian language, let me know, I can make reviews. I also try to make profit out of my university's 6 M€/y expenditure on bibliographic stuff, so feel free to mail me a DOI to check for you. --Nemo 11:24, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for these offers! And you're welcome to take on English-language material too ;) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 13:53, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Contributors wanted for editorial tasks

With the June 2014 edition, the Wikimedia Research Newsletter has now come out every month for a full three years. This huge success is thanks to the volunteers who every month contribute by reading and reviewing new publications, and we would like to open up the editorial side a bit more to interested contributors, too. While I'm happy to continue shepherding the publication together with Dario and putting out the issue each month, we both often have an unfortunately very limited time budget for the newsletter, and there are several important editorial tasks that were frequently left out because of lack of time. Please take a look at the list below and sign up in the right column if you would like to commit to taking on one of these work areas. Feel free to ask questions here or on IRC (#wikimedia-research).

I would like to highlight the notification of researchers - the last row in the table - as a very valuable activity for connecting researchers with the community's perspective (not all of them are aware of the WRN). It's also a nice way to get into contact with researchers in person. In one case, it lead to a RL meeting between the reviewer - a grad student - and the paper's author -a more senior researcher.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Task description and remarks	Example / notes	Timing	Time required per month	Volunteers
Send a general invitation to potential reviewers	[2] (choice of format and recipient list up for discussion)	Several days before the scheduled publication date (last Wednesday of the month) (coordinate with editors to make sure the Etherpad todo list is ready)	30 min or less	Masssly
Bibliographical support: Ensure that citations contain the necessary bibliographical information and are entered in the research newletter's Zotero list, also in preparation of the release of the annual corpus (example)	Contact Dario for Zotero access	Before actual publication		?
Add illustrations (from covered open access papers, or elsewhere)	[3]	Before actual publication
Add per-review bylines (in addition to the general bylines on top)		Before actual publication		Hanteng (July 2014 issue), Hfordsa, Masssly
Post on Wiki-research-l about the new issue	[4]	Soon after publication of the new issue on Meta and the blog	<30 min	Masssly
Notify researchers that their paper has been covered (by email; contact addresses are listed in most papers)		Soon after publication of the new issue on Meta and the blog	<1h month (with some routine)	Masssly

Library export

I've imported to http://wikipapers.referata.com all the (slightly messy) records for journals, conferences and theses contained in w:en:Wikipedia:Academic studies of Wikipedia. I often use wikipaper's semantic search by topic etc., so I need it fuller. What's the best way to get citations out of the research newsletter (and link the respective reviews)? The refs are not so comfortable; is the Zotero library complete? Ideally I'd also export abstracts etc. at the same time. --Nemo 13:40, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Business as usual?

Re [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Tilman Bayer joins Product & Strategy Department, am I correct in my hope that Tilman will keep editing/running the newsletter? --Nemo 21:57, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

ORCID

Many researchers will have, or be interested in, an ORCID identifier. Perhaps you would like to feature an item about my role as Wikimedian in Residence at ORCID; and how researchers can show their ORCID ID on their user page? See WP:ORCID for background. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:19, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Respiratory topics in Wikipedia

Hello. I have prepared a draft for inclusion in the Newsletter. Axl (talk) 14:10, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Public attitudes to chemistry

The Royal Society of Chemistry (where I'm Wikimedian in Residence) has published a major report on its research into "public attitudes to chemistry in the UK". There are a couple of comments about Wikipedia. Perhaps you would like to mention this in the newsletter? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:15, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Discarded items

I sometimes note on the etherpad of the month that a particular item I read is not worth covering, either because it's hardly "research" or because its quality is vastly insufficient. Where should these go? I know the potentially useful items which happen to be uninteresting to reviewers are sometimes "dumped" into a list of citations at the end of an issue, but that's another story. --Nemo 13:40, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Good work, Nemo. We might create an archive that would document negative quick review results and might help future authors learn more about the standards voiced by WM Research Newsletter activists at a given time. --C.Koltzenburg (talk) 10:12, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

As discussed elsewhere since, this appears to have been based on a misunderstanding about the scope of the newsletter. While yes, publications that are not research in any sense should be left out, we strive for comprehensiveness otherwise - not every item is a reading recommendation, in fact it can well be the opposite sometimes (and that's valuable for our readers too: we read it so they don't have to). I am a bit concerned sometimes whether we give the important, high-quality stuff enough room proportionally, but that problem isn't solved by removing one-liners that cover the less shining papers. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:56, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Well, those items were not even worth the time to write a one-liner. Reducing the worthless items in the etherpad would help me find things I can help with. Nemo 08:53, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

By one-liners above, I meant reproducing the bibliographical reference without actually reading the paper in question. Agree that an actual summary needs work even if it consists just of one line. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

In that case, I rephrase my original question: how should I note that an item should only be cited, but not reviewed? Nemo 17:46, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Something like "I (Nemo) read this and think it is not worth a review (because X); should be included as a list item only" works. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

I already did that in the past, but then you wrote in this section that I misunderstood the purpose of the newsletter. I've not checked the fate of the publications which I deemed unworthy. Personally, I still think that some items which are not research by any meaningful sense of the word should not be listed, or should only be listed as a warning. Nemo 08:04, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

The newsletter's bibliographic process needs to be revamped

(This is basically just writing down a backlog todo item for myself and other interested people, to be addressed at a later point.)

After almost half a decade of its existence, this research newsletter has built up a very useful corpus of Wikimedia-related research (referred to in literature reviews etc.) using a pragmatic bibliographic process for finding, tracking and archiving research publications that keeps the ongoing effort somewhat manageable. But this process is still brittle and inefficient in various aspects (see also general notes on the production process), and also we are years behind with publishing our annual datasets like [5]. I'd love to be able to set aside some time to revamp the process with the help of some people who are knowledgeable in this area. Some have already offered to help and worked on some parts, e.g. Masssly has backfilled many publications from last year in our Zotero corpus, and Guillaume has investigated how to convert it into a group account that would enable contributions by more people. But someone would need to take the lead in identifying other needs and tasks and then moving things forward on this; and I at least haven't found the time for that yet. (Personally, I love good clean well-groomed bibliographic citations, but it hasn't been my main focus with the research newsletter - I prefer to use the limited time I am able to devote to it for other editorial tasks.)

A small concrete step would be to file bugs for the Zotero export issues that hit us basically every month (example [6] [7]). And to record another current issue here, the generally very useful archive search function is affected by a bug in the on-wiki search function that my colleagues from the WMF Discovery team probably won't be able to fix very soon, phab:T129762.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

More comprehensive/regular importing to http://wikipapers.referata.com/ would be the solution, IMHO. I'm sure Emijrp would be glad to make you administrator there, if needed. Nemo 19:04, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion, but that would basically be the opposite of a solution - adding extra work and complicating things. The advantage of Zotero has been that it allows to import a citation from a URL largely automatically, and then export it into a template like Cite journal. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Note on current publication schedule issues

In recent months we have fallen a lot behind our usual monthly schedule, and currently still have to put the February issue out. This is basically due to problems at the Signpost, which has been coming out less and less often since last year, and right now sadly appears to be on the verge of dying (cf. [8] [9]).

Since its founding in 2011, the production process for this newsletter has involved publishing each new issue as part of the current Signpost edition first, and then republishing it here on Meta and in other channels. This arrangement came about naturally (the research newsletter grew out of a series of "recent research" articles that I published while I was still editor-in-chief of the Signpost myself), and has served us well for half a decade. However, it seems no longer tenable right now, so I plan to publish the upcoming issue in the other channels first. If and when the Signpost gets revived, we can then still syndicate it there. But if not, we will need to start thinking about what to do instead to serve the (significant) part of our audience who has so far been relying on receiving new issues as part of the Signpost. It may involve setting up a separate talk page delivery option.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 04:05, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost has been revived after a change in editorship, and we're still catching up currently, by publishing a new research newsletter with every new Signpost issue (i.e. more often than once per month). The "May" issue just went out and the June issue should come out with the next Signpost, hopefully on August 18. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:37, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Update: While the Signpost has remained active since then, it hasn't come out much more frequently than once a month recently. So the research newsletter's nominal publication month won't be able to catch up with the real publication date any time soon if we continue to name issues sequentially, and on the other hand that discrepancy has caused quite a bit of confusion. Therefore we are skipping the October-December 2017 issues and resume with January 2018. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 04:36, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Process question

I am happy to review some articles, though I have had trouble understanding the process or who to ask for clarification. Can anybody point me to the process, as the information and instructions on the Etherpad document seemed a bit dated and confusing to me. Thanks. FULBERT (talk) 15:56, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Glad I was able to help with the current issue. Want to continue with it. Any idea when the next one will begin? FULBERT (talk) 17:49, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

FULBERT: Next Signpost issue will be published on January 26-28.--Eddie891 (talk) 22:18, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Eddie891. Seems there is an intention for this to be a bit more regular. Good to hear that!! Time for me to get cracking!! FULBERT (talk) 14:52, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Completed review

I completed a review of an article: Maki, Keith; Yoder, Michael; Jo, Yohan; Rosé, Carolyn (2017). "Roles and Success in Wikipedia Talk Pages: Identifying Latent Patterns of Behavior". Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) 1: 1026–1035. Retrieved 2017-12-06. 

Are you a policy wonk?

This Carnegie Mellon University study quantified the success of those editors who engage in talk page discussions and their roles in these discussions. The role assigned to each editor was:

• Moderator - decides when a decision is final to support their views
• Architect - designs the article and its sections to support their views
• Policy Wonk - quotes acronyms that represent policy/rules/guidelines to support their view
• Wordsmith - determines the best article titles and section titles based upon their point of view
• Expert - interjects facts into the discussion to support their point of view

Unlike earlier studies exploring editor interactions, editors in this study could be assigned simultaneous roles on an article talk page. Success of each editor was determined by analyzing subsequent edits to the article under discussion which were promoted by a particular editor and longevity of these edits. Those editors that are more detail-oriented tend to have more success than those more interested in organization. Multiple editors assuming the role of organization lessens the success of individual editors. The study assessed 7,211 articles, 21,108 discussion threads, 21,108 editor discussion pairs, and the average number of editors per discussion. The number of total edits by an editor is not associated with success.

Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 12:06, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Social network redistribution

Thank you Tilman for the updates. For what it's worth, I found https://moa.party/ to be a very reliable bridge to Mastodon servers (it can also bridge from Instagram but that's not particularly useful). There are a few Mastodon instances whose userbase is favourable for such a topic: https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/index.html can serve as a guide but for instance I see scholar.social exists and friendly people use a few other servers. For specific topics I found that the WMIT feed often attracts more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. Nemo 09:30, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Looking for data people

We have a data question at w:en:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/RFC on pharmaceutical drug prices. We'd like to know whether this is a reasonable/non-misleading use of this database (and if it's not, then how we could do it better). Most of the folks involved are experienced editors, but we're not data geeks. If you're interested, please help us figure out the best way to improve Wikipedia's drug articles by posting your advice over there. Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Message sent to wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org rejected

I'm not sure how to message you all about reviewing a recent scholarly article after my message to the list (which I subscribed to and confirmed) was rejected. ("Your message has been rejected, probably because you are not subscribed to the mailing list and the list's policy is to prohibit non-members from posting to it.") Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 05:56, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

@Markworthen: I can't speak for moderators of that list (which according the list description page should be reachable via wiki-research-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org ). In general, I would double-check in such a situation whether I am subscribed to the list with the same address that I tried to post the rejected message from.

For the specific purpose of letting us know about a new paper to be covered in the newsletter, feel free to resort to the alternative contact options listed under Research:Newsletter#Contact.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:05, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much HaeB! Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 02:40, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikis used in universities for collegial decision-making

Do we know of any cases of a university that uses a wiki for its internal academic community (staff + students) consistently with what universities are supposed to fundamentally be about: collegial, rational, structured, transparent decision-making not just about knowledge of the world, but about how that particular university is organised? These do not have to be public wikis, but if they're internal only, then some sort of info (ideally a research paper) is what I'd like. The idea is that instead of wasting huge amounts of energy with "he said that she said that he said that she said that first this has to be done because of such a rule" or "he'll do it" or "it was done" (but then it doesn't get done or wasn't done), there's an efficient overlayer of wikified discussion and analysis. The Wikipedia community exists with this; there's no reason why a university shouldn't try it, especially since there would be the added convenience of not having anonymous users.

I found these three public (or at least partly public) wikis at universities:

• https://imt.uni-paderborn.de/en/wiki
• https://www.wiwi.rwth-aachen.de/cms/Wirtschaftswissenschaften/Studium/Studienmanagement/~edsa/Wiki-intern/lidx/1/
• https://innsida.ntnu.no/wiki

I am not interested (in this message) in the use of wikis for teaching purposes; that's already a well-recognised activity and topic of research.

Boud (talk) 00:15, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I already made this proposal for UFSC and it was not implemented for the following two reasons: 1) an internal system already existed, 2) the internal system, although worse, was easier to use. Let me know if you write some kind of presentation. Thanks. --Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 09:37, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@Felipe da Fonseca: Excellent! Glad I'm not the first person to think of this. :) This is not for a presentation, this is for trying to get the idea implemented both technically and in terms of the users - academics/admin/students. So far only email discussions and one high-level f2f meeting. I have one specific response wanting to know of precedents. Are there any specifics that you can give me publicly? e.g. what type of system is the existing internal system? is it a free-software-licensed system? are there any reports about the fraction of the university members who use it, on effectiveness, conflict resolution, development of guidelines and policies? Info in portuguese would be fine, I should be able to more or less get the gist of it without an auto-translator. (Obviously, research should be done about the use of wikis as serious communication and decision-making academic spaces in universities once this happens widely enough; but for the moment it's getting it happening that I'm interested in.) Boud (talk) 01:03, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Boud: It is a system from the university. Unfortunately it was a long time ago that I made this proposal and practically no information was provided to me, so I cannot say too much. Moreover, I myself, although I studied for many years at this university, used little or very little of the system. Just the fact that I used the system a little shows how little it is useful: with the exception of this pandemic moment, it was used only for distance learning, which constitutes a very small part of the academic community. In addition, I can also tell you that the age of teachers is advanced and they have (at least in the Humanities area) a great difficulty with technology: teachers simply do not know how to use the UFSC platform. In this way, I see more of a fear of change than the real complexity of the wiki: they haven't been able to learn their system in years, imagine if they moved to a new one ... So, is more a question of marketing, I think.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 09:59, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Boud:I have a concrete example for you: I was on a university library commission and we were writing the text that would go on their website about our commission. The text was being written and projected in front of us, and I started to be extremely attentive with the linguistic correction, I suggested three or four modifications, until they lost patience and told me: this is still going to the corrector, he is the one who will publish the text, it takes another week or so. That's when I realized I was in a parallel universe.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 10:14, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Felipe da Fonseca: Thanks for the extra details and the anecdote :). To both you and Nemo bis: I'd like to start a text that:

• argues the case for a (generic) university to have an internal wiki for all students and faculty that aims to contribute to internal university decision-making and preparation of texts to be formally voted by traditional decision-making bodies
• has a short version that is short enough for TL;DR
• has a long version for in-depth debate to:
  • counter the corporate arguments about using gafamic first-party and third-party servers
  • deal with fears about loss of hierarchical control by pointing out that faculty and staff are inevitably going to use GAFAM or non-GAFAM online communication in any case to coordinate in opposition to the formal hierarchy in any highly online community
• includes references to both preprint and (preferably) peer-reviewed wiki research to show empirical evidence for why a wiki is a good solution
• includes comments on re-training faculty and students who think of computer services as magic black boxes and need help to learn the advantages of a practical right-to-understand
• includes an honest debate of the likely risks and difficulties (serious decisions include formal university rules, decisions on jobs and university structures, and decisions on money, which could all be highly controversial and would risk violating state and internal university laws on privacy and secrecy and on the formal roles and rights of military and religious institutions in the university)
• includes an overview of existing university wikis (such as Helsinki University, thanks Nemo!) summarising (initially in English) a qualitative description of the usage and some statistics and any formal research carried out about the effectiveness, advantages and risks of those wikis

I'm wondering if this would make sense in Research: space here. Strictly speaking, the main idea is a wikification of a component of research itself - a proposal to wikify a university - rather than a research project on wikis. However, it could be considered as an experimental wiki project, in the sense of asking whether an intra-university-wiki is capable of being viable, and after a 12 or 24 or 36 month trial period, what are the qualitative and quantitative arguments supporting its viability? A quantitative argument for success would be that, for example, that parts of the university's internal statutes were changed more or less in line with the consensus recommendation from the university's wiki community. Statistics on usage would not be so useful: the aim would be to be practical in university decision-making, not just prove that people can communicate.

Would this be likely to be acceptable in "Project" space? Boud (talk) 22:35, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Looking at {{Research project}}, it does seem to me that in the sense of action research in the digital humanities, this would qualify as a wiki research project. Boud (talk) 23:01, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

@Boud: It's an interesting idea. Do you already have a place to test it, I mean, some university? I think the first step would be to test it not as a decision tool (this is a large step), but as a page from and in a section of the university. For example, a wikipage from some UB.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 13:38, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

@Felipe da Fonseca: The aim is very much to convince people in my university to implement it, and I see the process of presenting a proper argument in favour as part of a bootstrap process. Tenured faculty and senior hierarchy will be more willing to implement it if there's evidence and a debate and the proposal survives the debate; if the implementation is done, then the public part of assessing the results will feedback to the wider community and strengthen the debate (debate in the wider academic sense of not just informal discussion, but peer-reviewed research articles). Regarding decision-making: I'll write this out more carefully, but if there is no chance of influencing decisions, then the motivation will be weak; on the other hand, obviously the first sorts of decisions would have to be useful but generally low-risk types of issues, and the formal decision would not be made on the wiki itself. That wouldn't really differ from the real situation: university formal body meetings (in my limited experience) deal with proposals that are well-prepared beforehand, and rarely reject proposals on the agenda; so the de facto decision-making is generally in the preparation before the legally binding meetings. (BTW, what's a UB in this context?) Boud (talk) 15:16, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, UB = university library.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 15:20, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't think I'll get on to this soon. We'll see... Boud (talk) 05:31, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

May 2021 issue skipped

A note for the record that because the May issue of the "Signpost" had to be canceled, we also skipped last month - but will resume with the June issue, due out this weekend (review contributions are welcome as always).

Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:01, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

In what sense are data on Wikipedia from 'reliable' sources dubious?

@HaeB: and other Research Newsletter volunteers: Just a reminder that my peer-reviewed reproducible paper primarily based on Wikipedia COVID-19 data (and making the observation that the Wikipedia data give broadly similar quantitative results to John Hopkins University data) has been hanging around on the etherpad for a few months... It would be nice if someone could review it for the newsletter and toot/tweet it...

• the primary data analysed is WikiProject COVID-19 Case Count Task Force data
• title: "Anti-clustering in the national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts"
• quote from the abstract: "... A statistically significant ($P_{\tau }<0.05$) correlation was found between the lack of media freedom in a country, as represented by a high Reporters sans frontieres Press Freedom Index (PFI2020), and the lack of statistical noise in the country's daily counts [collected by Wikipedia's WikiProject COVID-19 Case Count Task Force]. The $\phi _{i}$ model appears to be an effective detector of suspiciously low statistical noise in the national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts."
• full ref: <ref name="Roukema2021">{{cite journal | last1 = Roukema | first1 = Boudewijn F. | author1-link = | title = Anti-clustering in the national SARS-CoV-2 daily infection counts | journal = [[PeerJ]] | volume = 9 | pages = e11856 | date = 2021-08-27 | url = https://peerj.com/articles/11856 | issn = 2167-8359 | doi = 10.7717/peerj.11856 | id = {{zenodo|5262698}} |arxiv=2007.11779 | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20210827184744if_/https://peerj.com/articles/11856 | archive-date= 2021-08-27 |url-status=live }}</ref>
• clickable peer-reviewed URL: @PeerJ
• possible blurbs for a toot/tweet on the Fediverse/Twitter:
  • Which countries' official pandemic data are unreliable but published in infoboxes and graphs without warning in Wikipedia anyway?
  • Wikipedia COVID-19 data found to be better than WHO data and to give comparable results to JHU data
    • nuance: the WP CCTF data are only shown to be better than WHO data for this particular type of analysis, for the daily counts; there is no evidence for the cumulative counts from WHO to be worse than the WP CCTF data; the compatibility with the JHU data is a qualitative interpretation of the quantitative analyses, done equivalently for both data sets
  • To answer the title of this section - a more specific version of the question is: how should Wikipedia handle unreliability in open government data when some of it is statistically suspicious? There is a Wikipedia: namespace essay motivated by this Wikipedia research published in PeerJ, but there is also other evidence that this is an unresolved reliability question: Wikipedia:Reliability of open government data.

Boud (talk) 22:37, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I was wondering how many views/readers the Research Newsletter gets monthly? Is there anywhere I can see these statistics? Thank you so much!--23.242.35.187 20:55, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Workshop registration announcement

Hi @HaeB and @Masssly. I hope you're doing well. As you may know, the 10th edition of Wiki Workshop will take place on May 11th, 2023 (virtually, free). I'd like to ask you to consider raising awareness about its registration in the upcoming Research Newsletter. Privacy statement for the workshop (which we link to before linking to the registration page): https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Wiki_Workshop_Privacy_Statement Registration page: https://pretix.eu/wikimedia/wikiworkshop2023/ Wiki Workshop page: https://wikiworkshop.org/2023/

New this year: we will have a developer track through which we aim to bring closer the Wikimedia volunteer researcher and developer communities.

Please let me know if you need anything from me and thanks for your consideration. LZia (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion! The upcoming (April) issue of the newsletter is coming out later than usual because of delays at the Signpost (with which we co-publish). But it now looks like we should still be able to get it out before May 11, in which case we'll make sure to include a reminder about Wiki Workshop. Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:41, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

French newsletter about Wikimedia & Universities

Hello,

The wikmedians in residence in French universities have launched a newsletter "Infolettre wikil@b". We will cover educational activities, research and open science. See fr:Projet:Wikifier la science/Infolettre. Pyb en résidence (talk) 21:25, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

A quick follow-up of the subscriptions before the second issue: 39 people by MassMessage and 130 by mail. Pyb en résidence (talk) 17:29, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Congrats! Looks like the scope is a bit different, but happy to give it a shout-out - I just quote-tweeted you and will make sure to mention it in the upcoming newsletter edition. (Apropos, I seem to recall that RAW also used to feature research news every now and then in the past?) Regard, HaeB (talk) 05:50, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Current audiences

Hi all. Thank you for your continued work on the Research Newsletter. I have a question for you (not urgent): who is the current audience of Research Newsletter? I see "Wikimedia community", however, I wonder if there are particular sections of the community that are your primary audience? (For example, given that the Newsletter is part of en Signpost, is it correct to assume that English Wikipedia community is one of your primary audiences? If yes, who else is in this group?) Along the same line, I would like to know if there are other audiences that you would like to add to the primary audiences for the Newsletter in the future.

For context: I've been thinking about how we (WMF Research team) can contribute to the Research Newsletter. I'd like to come back to you with a couple of proposals. The information about the primary audience can help me have a more relevant proposal for your consideration.

Thank you for your time in advance. LZia (WMF) (talk) 20:34, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Recruitment post on Research Newsletter

Hi all. We're recruiting for a study about community research ethics on Wikipedia and I informed the Research Newsletter might be a good place to share the word. I made a post to be reviewed, but I'm unsure if this kind of content is appropriate for the newsletter. Can anyone share their thoughts?

Some context: I've already made a post on wiki-research-I and done some probing on a few community talk pages. We haven't had much success with reaching a broader audience of Wikipedia editors (at least one's that are interested in participating).

Thank you for your help! Zentavious (talk) 17:44, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Etherpad link

Just noting that the link to the upcoming issue's etherpad in the "How to contribute" section, which is expressed as [https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN{{CURRENTYEAR}}{{CURRENTMONTH}} an Etherpad] does not always link to the latest etherpad.

For example today, which is still November, it links to the already posted November issue's etherpad at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN202411 instead of to the upcoming December issue's etherpad at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN202412.

Any ideas of how to fix this? Maybe including a link to the following etherpad on the previous etherpad when it is updated to note that the issue has been published already? Diegodlh (talk) 17:06, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Good point. I have modified that link under Research:Newsletter#How_to_contribute so that it should now point to the Etherpad for the next month in case the current month's issue has already been published. (We usually try to create the pad for the upcoming issue soon after the preceding one is out, although it will generally not yet be updated with new publications to cover until about a week before the publication deadline.) Thanks for raising this issue!

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:40, 20 December 2024 (UTC) (Tilman)