2025:Program/5 Research Findings and How You Can Use Them in Your Work

Session title: 5 Research Findings and How You Can Use Them in Your Work

Session type: Workshop - 85 minutes

Track: Research

Language: en

🎥 Not recorded

We share 5 key findings from our research on the Wikimedia projects during the past year that you can utilize in your work. We then facilitate spaces where Wikimedians can share their perspective and knowledge about each of the key findings, exchange proposals for how to use them in their work, and optionally propose follow-up next steps to bring the findings to their work or the work of their communities.

Description

Context: Every year the Research team [1] at the Wikimedia Foundation along with our Research Fellow, Formal Collaborators, Research Contractors and Interns spends thousands of hours conducting research on the Wikimedia projects. We communicate these findings through a variety of means including but not limited to publishing scientific papers [2] and the bi-annual Research Reports [3]. Over the past three years we have held a session during Wikimania in which we bring some of our key findings to the Wikimania participants. The feedback we have received about this session has been very positive and we are happy to offer it back to the communities in 2025.

Goal: Our goal is to share key research findings from research we have conducted over the past year. These findings can help different participants in different ways: If you are a Wikimedia developer, researcher, or designer, these findings can inform your decisions about what to research, test, or build for the Wikimedia projects; If you are involved in policy or governance decisions in your projects, the findings from the research and the conversations that we facilitate will help you or your communities make more research informed decisions.

[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html [2] https://research.wikimedia.org/publications.html [3] https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html

How does your session relate to the event theme, Wikimania@20 – Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?

By sharing key findings from research over the past year as well as facilitating conversations among the participants for potential actions based on the findings: we increase the impact of research, and we increase the impact of the communities by supporting them with research informed decision making.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Speakers

• leila

Hi. My name is Leila. I am the Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation and I lead the research direction of the organization. I joined WMF in 2014 as a Research Research Scientist and since then have been involved in a variety of research initiatives at different capacities. These days my primary focus is supporting the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation to conduct research in support of the Wikimedia Movement and to strengthen the Wikimedia research community. You can learn about the team's work at: https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html. I'm an affiliate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

You can learn more about me at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LZia_(WMF).