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2006:Wikimania/Program/Research thingy

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There have been ideas floating about for different types of research workshop/tutorials at Wikimania 2006, and this page exists to brainstorm ideas that we have for it.

See: the scheduled research workshop/bof. Free free to discuss here!

So far (and so far as I understand it) we have:

  • Doing primary research on Wikimedia projects - people (eg. those listed on Research) who are researching the content and processes of Wikimedia projects (and possibly other wikis too)
  • Doing secondary research using Wikimedia projects - eg. using wikipedia as an academic resource
  • Research and development (ie. technical aspects) of Wikimedia projects - this could be taken care of during the hacking days, but not necessarily

The first one above was supposed to happen during Wikimania 2005, but never took place; instead consisting of informal conversations and links made through individual researchers. General feedback is that we want something more concrete to happen this year - what form this takes remains to be seen.

Please help to clarify what you think would be useful for you - ideas to be covered, format (ie semi-formal presentations, open discussion etc). And obviously, help to clarify the titles of these events - the title is currently deliberately vague to try to provoke some action :-)


Research ON Wikimedia projects

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Please add ideas here

  • Open discussion - would work to try to bounce ideas off each other, share perspectives, problems, issues. More a workshop than a tutorial - needs time (90 mins?). Would need to be moderated, and could benefit from a series of questions or themes drawn up in advance to be discussed during the event. I would still like to see it being open to new material from the participants - it should serve to be really useful. I would warn against it becoming a lecture on how to do good research - I would much rather see it as a way to question and challenge researchers' own experiences (and, yes, assumptions) in order to sharpen an understanding of what social research is about in a Wikimedia context, and hopefully of what constitutes good practice. Cormaggio @
  • Across (and even within!) different research traditions there will be a great deal of variability. It can be difficult, for example, for researchers within the area of social computing to talk about their methods, goals, and results with the same vocabulary, let alone try to enter into a constructive discourse with folks doing (for example) legal, psychological, or other kinds of research on the projects. It seems to me that if we want to have anything more than a "this is what I did last summer" type discussion, we'll either need to further define the scope of the research that's being discussed or agree to spend some time up front explicitly exploring the research traditions that our individual work builds upon and how these traditions relate to one another. Andicat
are we thinking of restricting this to social sciences or research more broadly... if only social science then that narrows things down considerably. When it gets closer to gametime, we might want to send an invitation to folks who submitted to the soc sci track, generate more ideas about what folks want to see? - Andicat

Interested in participating

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Please add yourself here

Research USING Wikimedia projects

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Please add ideas here

Interested in participating

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Please add yourself here

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