2025:Program/State of Wikimedia Research 2024-2025
Session title: State of Wikimedia Research 2024-2025
- Session type: Lecture
- Track: Research
- Language: en
đ„ Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/3UcJ5Tgcthc?feature=shared&t=896 đ„
This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects from the last year. It will give a bird's-eye view of Wikimedia research and go into depth on a dozen or so of the most important findings from the last year. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the foundation, and our community as a whole might be able to learn about ourselves.
Description
This presentation has been a regular talk given at Wikimania for many years. Previous versions have been given (almost) every year since 2009.
This talk will offer a quick tour of scholarship and academic research on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects from the last year. It will give a bird's-eye view of Wikimedia research and go into depth on a half-dozen or so of the most important findings from the last year. The goal is to explain both what our community is teaching others and what Wikimedia editors, the foundation, and our community as a whole might be able to learn about ourselves. While wonderful research will feature elsewhere in the program, this talk will focus on the other important results not presented at Wikimania. The presentation will build on the speakers' work on the monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Hundreds of scholarly publications (i.e., articles, books, theses, etc.) that contain the term "Wikipedia" in their title appear yearly. What does all this work mean for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects? How can our community learn from academic research into our projects? Does any of this work have anything to teach us about how to run our projects? What does all that academic jargon mean in terms that any editor could understand?
This talk will try to point toward answers to these questions with a literature review (in scholarly parlance) of the last year's academic landscape around Wikimedia and its projects, geared at non-academic editors and readers.
This talk will be a group effort, and there will be several organizers and speakers. Confirmed speakers include Tilman Bayer and Benjamin Mako Hill.
- How does your session relate to the event theme, Wikimania@20 â Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
We intend to cover work on inclusivity, impact, and sustainability of our projectsâall major areas of research in and about Wikimedia projects.
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
Everyone can participate in this session
Resources
- Slides in PDF format (hosted on speaker's homepage)
Speakers
- Benjamin Mako Hill
- In my day job, I teach and do research at the University of Washington. I am also an active editor on several wikis and work with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation community to support academic research related to wikis and Wikimedia in a number of ways. Please see my user page on meta for more information.
- Tilman Bayer
- Tilman is the editor-in-chief of the <a href=https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter> Wikimedia Research Newsletter</a>, which has been covering research of relevance to the Wikimedia community monthly since 2011, and co-maintainer of the associated <a href=https://twitter.com/WikiResearch>@WikiResearch social media feed</a>. A Wikipedian since 2003, he also worked for the Wikimedia Foundation from 2011 to 2019, most recently as senior data analyst.