The Research, Analytics, Scoring Platform and occasionally other teams in tech and product, receive on a regular basis unsolicited requests for formal collaborations or access to private data, via channels other than the public mailing lists.

When this happens, proposals are reviewed as they come in. In the (rare) case where they have a strong alignment with our organizational priorities, they go through the process to become formal agreements subject to our research collaboration policy. Otherwise, they are declined with a note to the original authors explaining why WMF is not in a position to honor these requests.

Building a repository of failed data access or research support requests is something that will help us determine the priority of future work involving public data and APIs. I'd like to design a process starting in FY18 via which we maintain a record of these requests and the rationale for the decision. This would require some work but will be a dramatic improvement in efficiency over the status quo where these requests are buried in mailboxes of individual people.