With roughly 20 billion monthly pageviews, 15 million monthly edits, and almost 55 million articles across 300+ languages, Wikipedia and its sister projects are an essential part of the free Knowledge ecosystem. These projects are created and maintained by a vast network of volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization operating Wikipedia, has a Research team of scientists, engineers, and community developers. They use data and scientific methods to support the needs and advance the understanding of the Wikimedia projects, their readers and their contributors. To expand the team's capacity and breadth of expertise, a focus area of the team is to improve the social and technical infrastructure that helps the broader Wikimedia Movement and research community to tackle complex research challenges. In this talk, members of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research team will give an overview of their recent efforts to support the community of researchers working on Wikimedia projects. Specifically, they will discuss i) the generation of open data resources; ii) tools for working with open Wikimedia data; and iii) building and releasing machine-learning models to support Wikimedia projects. The goal of this talk is to demonstrate to open tool developers and researchers how to leverage these resources and contribute to the Wikimedia Research community.
Speakers: Martin Gerlach Pablo Aragón Emily Lescak