Programs

Conduct Foundational Work

We are building our foundational social and technical infrastructure to enhance our research community's ability to tackle large problems.

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Project overview

Wikimedia projects are created and maintained by a vast network of individual contributors and organizations with different roles and expertise. The Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikimedia Research, plays an important role in supporting these efforts, but our internal capacity and expertise will always be more limited than those of the Movement as a whole. Tackling the strategic challenges ahead requires an investment in ​foundational social and technical infrastructure that individuals, groups, and organizations across the Movement can use.

We see an urgent need for increasing the development and dissemination of foundational resources to grow research capacities across the Movement. These foundational resources take many forms: new tools for developing scientific knowledge about projects and contributors; new open data resources and improved tools for working with them; new methods and guidance for mission-aligned research and technology development; and outreach activities designed to foster a healthy, diverse, and dynamic community of researchers to be part of the Wikimedia Movement.

More information can be found in our white paper and research community vision and strategy.

Recent updates

  1. Publishing Wikipedia usage data with strong privacy guarantees

    We released a paper about the process for releasing new differentially-private datasets of geographic reader data.
  2. Differential Privacy Data Release

    We collaborated with the Security team to release a new, differentially-private dataset of geographic pageview data for the Wikimedia projects.
  3. Wiki Workshop 2023

    The 10th edition of Wiki Workshop is scheduled for May 11, 2023. You are invited to participate.
  4. From Hell to HTML

    We released a new blogpost detailing our work to build a Python library for making the Enterprise HTML dumps more accessible to researchers.
  5. 7th Research Report Released

    The report describes what our Research team worked on between June and December 2022.
  6. 2022 Research Fund Grantees Announced

    The Wikimedia Foundation's Community Resources and Research teams are excited to announce the 2022 Research Fund grantees!
  7. Research Community Vision and Strategy

    We released our vision and strategy for supporting the network of researchers working on the Wikimedia projects.
  8. 6th Research Report Released

    The report describes what our Research team worked on between January and June 2022.
  9. Python Library for Describing Edits

    We developed a new Python library for providing structured summaries of what was changed by edits on Wikipedia.

Publications

Resources and links