Research:Newsletter

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The inaugural edition of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, published on July 25, 2011.

The Wikimedia Research Newsletter (WRN) covers research of relevance to the Wikimedia community. It has been appearing generally monthly since 2011, and features both academic research publications and internal research done at the Wikimedia Foundation. It is published as a section of The Signpost (titled "Recent research") and as a stand-alone article on Meta-Wiki.

Team[edit]

The newsletter was founded in 2011 by Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation. As of 2020, the core editorial team consists of Tilman (as the editor-in-chief) and Masssly, and around 90 bylined contributors have volunteered reviews and writeups since 2011. The associated @WikiResearch Twitter feed, where almost all covered papers are posted first, is run by Miriam Redi and Tilman, and has over 12,000 followers as of July 2020, and the @wikiresearch Fediverse feed has 33 followers on 8 different Fediverse community servers as of 23 September 2021.

How to subscribe[edit]

To receive the full text of each new issue in the form of an HTML email, sign up here.
The table of contents of each issue is cross-posted to the wiki-research-l mailing list.
Follow the @WikiResearch feed on Twitter (also mirrored on Facebook and on mastodon.social). In addition to the monthly announcement of each new WRN issue, it also points to new preprints, papers or research-related blog posts before they are reviewed more fully in the upcoming issue.
The Newsletters are also included in Wikipedia's The Signpost newspaper (which appears monthly), so if you subscribe to The Signpost, you'll receive the newsletter with your regular Signpost delivery to your Wikipedia talk page.

Archives[edit]

Search the WRN archives[edit]

Examples: Find research involving administrators / vandalism / pageviews / gender / Wiktionary.

Volume 12 (2022)[edit]

Volume 11 (2021)[edit]

(The May 2021 issue was skipped.)

Volume 10 (2020)[edit]

Volume 9 (2019)[edit]

Volume 8 (2018)[edit]

(The December 2018 issue was skipped.)

(The March-April 2018 issues were skipped.)

Volume 7 (2017)[edit]

(The October–December 2017 issues were skipped.)

Volume 6 (2016)[edit]

Volume 5 (2015)[edit]

Volume 4 (2014)[edit]

Volume 3 (2013)[edit]

Volume 2 (2012)[edit]

Volume 1 (2011)[edit]

Until 2018, issues were also published on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog.

How to contribute[edit]

This newsletter would not be possible without contributions from the research and Wikimedia community. We welcome submissions of new projects, papers and datasets to be featured in the newsletter. Work on the upcoming edition is coordinated on an Etherpad, where you can suggest items to be covered, or sign up to write a review or summary for one of those that are already listed. Beyond that:

If you want your project to be featured, please create a new project page using the form on the research project directory.
If you have released code or data of relevance to research on Wikimedia projects, please contact us.

For anything else that might be of interest to our readers (such as events, CFPs, research blog posts) please get in touch or post an announcement to wiki-research-l (we are monitoring this list on a regular basis). Separately, see here for how to contact the Research department of the Wikimedia Foundation about collaborations etc.

We are also looking for contributors (either occasional or regular) for the newsletter. If you have reviewed recent Wikipedia literature or would like to help writing the newsletter, please contact us.

Open access vs. closed access publications[edit]

Complete references of the publications featured in the newsletter can be found at the bottom of each issue. We aim to include a link to a freely accessible version whenever possible. Publications that are not open access (i.e. behind a paywall or tied to institutional subscriptions) will be marked with a closed access icon:

Dalip, Daniel Hasan, Raquel Lara Santos, Diogo Rennó Oliveira, Valéria Freitas Amaral, Marcos André Gonçalves, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Raquel C.M. Minardi, and Jussara Marques de Almeida (2011). GreenWiki: A tool to support users' assessment of the quality of Wikipedia articles. In Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL '11), 469. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. DOI

.

Corpus of covered research publications[edit]

The inaugural issue of the WRN was published on July 25, 2011 – shortly after the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index and after two Signpost articles covering recent Wikimedia research.

The six issues published in the first volume (July–December 2011), featuring 87 unique publications, are available as a downloadable 45-page PDF, and a print version can be ordered from Pediapress. The full list of publications reviewed or covered in the Newsletter in 2011 can be browsed online or downloaded (as a BibTeX, RIS, PDF file or in other formats), ready to be imported into reference managers or other bodies of wiki research literature. Read more...

The twelve issues of the second volume (January–December 2012) covered 225 publications. This corpus can be browsed online on Zotero, or downloaded as BibTeX file from datahub.io. Read more...

Most of the publications covered in subsequent years, alongside some that have not been covered yet, are contained in less curated form in our Zotero library, comprising around 1800 items as of July 2020.

Contact[edit]

For general queries on the research newsletter other than project or paper contributions you can leave a message on the talk page, send a DM on Twitter, or email wikiresearch-contact at googlegroups.com.