The goal of this task is to identify a solution to make our work in Research (as well as the associated resources – datasets, research reports, code libraries, formal collaboration FAQs) more discoverable to audiences outside of the Wikimedia movement.
Why do you need a separate website and subdomain when a wiki page works just as well?
Information about the WMF Research Team, our ongoing work, and our output, is shared across multiple wikis (meta – in a space shared with community members and academic researchers; the Foundation wiki – hosting information on our research collaboration policies; Wikimedia Commons – for scientific media and reports; mediawiki.org – for quarterly goals), as well as a large number of other platforms and websites: Phabricator (for task tracking); the Wikimedia Blog (for blog posts, announcement and stories); Figshare (as our primary open data registry); Twitter (with WikiResearch as our social handle for community-facing updates); Github (as a code repository); ArXiV, the ACM Digital Library and other publication repositories (for our peer reviewed output).
We decided to create a Research landing page to provide an additional, central location where people and organizations can discover the work of the team. This landing page is intended for folks who have less familiarity with the Wikimedia Movement: potential academic collaborators, journalists, and grantmaking organizations. These audiences expect research teams at technology organizations to have a single go-to page that provides an overview of the team and its work, as well as links to relevant resources, contact information, collaboration and partnership opportunities, and ways to follow the team's work.
The landing page will help us reduce the costs of communicating this kind of information to interested parties, while providing an additional and high-level discoverability layer for our ongoing programs and team structure, and a canonical list of research outputs and resources that are most relevant to them--papers, presentations, datasets, libraries, and tools--in a way that is easy to explore.
Any content that is in-progress or likely to change rapidly will still live on wiki, and will be linked to from the landing page.