[Wiki-research-l] Re: Research Fund Update

[Chiemezie Atama]

Dear Emily
I am glad to here from you. I had in mind to reach out but mindful of your
engagements, I did not want to bother you. I happy to hear that a new
request for proposal will be coming out. Thanks a lot for sharing this news
with me. With my team, we shall start working on our proposal. I will
review the criteria and also keep tuned.
Thanks a lot.
Best.

On Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:03 PM Emily Lescak  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We are enthusiastic to announce that we will open the next request
> for proposals to the Research Fund in the coming months. We encourage you
> to review the Meta page [1] for general information about the Fund,
> eligibility criteria, and previous submissions and begin planning your
> proposals. Stay tuned for further instructions, office hour dates, and an
> announcement of the first round of grantees. You can reach out to
> research_f...@wikimedia.org with questions.
>
> Best,
> Emily, on behalf of the Research Fund Organizing Committee
>
> [1]
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Technology_Fund
>
>
> --
> Emily Lescak (she / her)
> Senior Research Community Officer
> The Wikimedia Foundation
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>
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[Wiki-research-l] WM Research team - time investment heads up

[Leila Zia]

Hi all,

If you interact with the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team [1] or
rely on some of the services that we offer to the Wikimedia research
community, I'd like to share an update with you regarding a change on
our team's end for the period of July 2022 until June 30, 2023 in
terms of how we invest our time on the Wikimedia Research Community
front.

==Context for the change==
We want to build a course that can help researchers (or potential
future researchers) learn how to contribute their research expertise
to the Wikimedia research community and Wikimedia Movement most
effectively and joyfully. :) Developing the course material will
require significant time investment from our small team. As a result,
we are pausing a couple of the existing team initiatives/activities or
are reducing time investment on some fronts. We may pause or lower
time investments on some other fronts as we progress towards
developing the course.

==What are we changing?==
1. We are pausing Monthly Research Office Hours [2] for 6 months with
a possibility of extending the pause to 12 months. Emily Lescak, our
senior Research Community Officer, had iterated over the format of the
office hours and we were looking forward to launching with the new
format in August. We will pick up experimenting with the changes that
she had planned once we start investing in this space again. :)

2. We are going to reduce our public speaking work (talks, tutorials,
keynotes, ...) and we may reduce some of the research community
service work we normally offer unless we have already committed to
them (PC member, track chair or PC chair roles and responsibilities,
etc.). We may continue doing the research service work in our
volunteer time.

3. We will be generally more conservative for picking up new
initiatives or actions/activities for our team.

==What will not change in the coming 6 months?==
* We are continuing to invest on three programs that our team has led
over the years: Address Knowledge Gaps, Improve Knowledge Integrity,
and Building the Foundations. [3]
* On the Research Community front, our team is currently planning to
continue to maintain these initiatives/activities:
** Research Fund
** WMF Research Award of the Year
** Wiki Workshop
** Monthly Research Showcases
** bi-annual Research Report
** Formal Collaborations program and mentoring interns

==Should you expect more changes in our services for you?==
We may need to reduce investments on more fronts. We will be able to
say this more accurately after we make some progress towards
developing the course. If we make some relatively major choices in
terms of time investment, we intend to continue notifying you through
this mailing list.

As a general approach: If there is a need for further prioritization
of activities, we will continue pausing or reducing time investment
considering the impact on the Wikimedia Research community as well as
estimated time needed for doing the activity.

==How can I be involved in developing the course?==
Thank you for considering joining forces on this front! :) Please
write to Emily Lescak (cc-ed) with your proposal about contributing to
the development of the course. We will reach out to you based on the
specifics of your proposal and the needs of the course.

And of course, there will be a page on MetaWiki about the course once
we know slightly more than "we want to develop a course".

==What we can look forward to?==
For years we have discussed developing a clear entry point for
researchers to learn how to contribute research to the Wikimedia
projects. We have done some initiatives within our team and in
collaborations with other teams: developing tutorials for the
resources that researchers can use, offering office hours to help
folks get started, investing in documentation, Research Funds, and
more. The course can act as a unifying effort or a force-multiplier
that can help us reach to more researchers from across the globe with
more diverse backgrounds and experiences and show them the possibility
and joy of contributing research to the Wikimedia projects.

If you have questions about this prioritization, you can reach out to
me directly or write on this thread.

Best,
Leila


[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[3] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html

--
Leila Zia
Head of Research
Wikimedia Foundation
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[Wiki-research-l] Research Fund Update

[Emily Lescak]

Hello,

We are enthusiastic to announce that we will open the next request
for proposals to the Research Fund in the coming months. We encourage you
to review the Meta page [1] for general information about the Fund,
eligibility criteria, and previous submissions and begin planning your
proposals. Stay tuned for further instructions, office hour dates, and an
announcement of the first round of grantees. You can reach out to
research_f...@wikimedia.org with questions.

Best,
Emily, on behalf of the Research Fund Organizing Committee

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Technology_Fund


-- 
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation
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[Wiki-research-l] Wikimedia Research Showcase July 20

[Emily Lescak]

Hi all,

The next Research Showcase, featuring the recipients of this year's
Wikimedia Foundation Research Awards of the Year, will be live-streamed
Wednesday, July 20, at 9:30 AM PST/16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMvXOQU5fX4


You are welcome to ask questions via YouTube chat or on IRC at
#wikimedia-research.

This month's presentations:
Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine
LearningBy *Krishna Srinivasan (Google)*The milestone improvements brought
about by deep representation learning and pre-training techniques have led
to large performance gains across downstream NLP, IR and Vision tasks.
Multimodal modeling techniques aim to leverage large high-quality
visio-linguistic datasets for learning complementary information across
image and text modalities. In this talk, I introduce the Wikipedia-based
Image Text (WIT) Dataset to better facilitate multimodal, multilingual
learning. WIT is composed of a curated set of 37.5 million entity rich
image-text examples with 11.5 million unique images across 108 Wikipedia
languages.

WIT’s unique advantages include: WIT is the largest multimodal dataset by
the number of image-text examples by 3x (at the time of writing). WIT is
massively multilingual (first of its kind) with coverage over 100+
languages. WIT represents a more diverse set of concepts and real world
entities relative to what previous datasets cover.

WIT Dataset is available for download and use via a Creative Commons
license here: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/wit

I conclude the talk with future directions to expand and extend the WIT
dataset. Link to paperː https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.01913.pdf
Assessing the Quality of Sources in Wikidata Across LanguagesBy *Gabriel
Amaral (King's College London)*Wikidata is one of the most important
sources of structured data on the web, built by a worldwide community of
volunteers. As a secondary source, its contents must be backed by credible
references; this is particularly important as Wikidata explicitly
encourages editors to add claims for which there is no broad consensus, as
long as they are corroborated by references. Nevertheless, despite this
essential link between content and references, Wikidata’s ability to
systematically assess and assure the quality of its references remains
limited. To this end, we carry out a mixed-methods study to determine the
relevance, ease of access, and authoritativeness of Wikidata references, at
scale and in different languages, using online crowdsourcing, descriptive
statistics, and machine learning. The findings help us ascertain the
quality of references in Wikidata, and identify common challenges in
defining and capturing the quality of user-generated multilingual
structured data on the web. Link to paperː
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3484828

You can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase


Emily, on behalf of the Research team

-- 
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation
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