Keynote, WikiSym 2013 (Hong Kong, Aug 6, 2013).

1. Descending Mount Everest
Steps towards applied Wikipedia research
Dario Taraborelli
Wikimedia Foundation
WikiSym 2013, Hong Kong, 6 August 2013

3. online collaboration

4. user-centered design

5. social

6. extensible

8. descending Mount Everest

9. huge
popularity

10. participation
5,000
10,000
New users
Wikipedia Github
15,000
30,000
New entries created
75,000
150,000
Entries modified

11. sustainability

12. Wikipedia in scholarly research

13. shifting attention
New research areas
gender gap, breaking news collaboration
Fast-growing topics
Wikipedia and higher education
Steady growth
Wikipedia as a corpus
Okoli et al. (2012), The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly
Research on Wikipedia
N. Jullien (2012) What we know about Wikipedia. A review of the literature analyzing the project(s).

14. John Riedl
building artifacts to
change the world

15. Task recommendation
SuggestBot
Vandalism detection
Stiki, ClueBot
Trending topic analysis
Wikipedia Live Monitor
Good-faith newbie detection
Snuggle

16. Showstoppers

17. subject recruitment
“Hello, I need a sample of
500 complete responses
from active English
Wikipedia administrators
by the end of this week”

18. policy change is hard
WP:NPOV
NEUTRAL POINT OF VIEW
WP:DELETE
DELETION POLICY
WP:BLP
BIOGRAPHIES OF LIVING PEOPLE
WP:OR
NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH

19. software integration is even harder

20. Equipment

21. Experimental toolkit 1. notifications

22. Experimental toolkit: 2. guiders

23. Experimental toolkit: 3. campaigns

24. Experimental toolkit
4. instrumentation

25. Wikimedia Tool Labs

26. Data sources and APIs

27. Research dissemination

28. WMF Product
VisualEditor
Complete the rollout. Make it faster,
more efficient, more intuitive. Fix bugs.
Get adoption to 100%. Support real-
time collaboration.
Growth
Increase the first-edit rate of new
registered users. Improve conversion
along the IP->registration funnel.
Flow
Redesign the UX of collaboration. Fix
the powerful but deeply flawed talk
page system.
Mobile
Support mobile editing. Design
microtasks optimized for
mobile devices.
Media
Build a new media contribution
workflow, integrated with
VisualEditor.
Language
Content translation as a new
participation vector.

29. we’re hiring

30. A new social contract for
Wikipedia research?

31. thank you
Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research
All contents other than the above images
Image credits
Mount Everest from Kalapatthar, by Pavel Novak (CC BY)
John T. Riedl, by Nicole Holdorph (CC BY SA)
Argentina - Mt Tronador Ascent - 33 - descending among the crevasses, by McKay Savage (CC BY)
Le Tarbesou, by Jean-Baptiste Bellet (CC BY)