@Easikingarmager thank you for this update. Sure. Please book a time.

@KinneretG You are going to put the template for this Research Report together (Thank you!). Here are a few things I'll need from you in addition given that I'll be out for some days, please:

• Set the deadline for the full report to be stable on December 12. That will give us a few days to ask for porting and checks on the website.
• The above deadline means that the work in Q2 will not be completed before the report goes out. This is okay. We report as much as we have finished by December 12.
• Assign work to sections similar to Research Report No 12 (consult with history as needed). For Applied Science, please check with Miriam who you can assign tasks to (follow up on yesterday's meeting).
• The deadline for the first complete draft of the subsections is December 5. When you assign tasks to folks please make that deadline clear through the assignment. That will give me time to do follow-ups and for folks to iterate as needed.

Thanks.

No updates this week.

No updates this week.

Isaac and team, thanks for working on this task. I made a few changes in it. I note that Jan 30, 2026 is not a realistic deadline, however, I do not know at the moment what is a realistic one so I put it at a time in the future as a draft. Writing of a paper for the meta-method is something we will more seriously consider starting February 2026 and if we go about that, that will require updating the deadline to a point later in the future until the writing and submitting concludes.

A note about my recent updates on this task:

• Miriam and I made some good progress on this task during July-September 2025. One of the highlights of that work was working with a group product manager to learn about their vision for implementing the AI strategy and their draft timelines. The other was that by spending some time on this task, we learned what is not clear and should be made clearer about it moving forward. To that end, I made some changes in the task now after coordinating with Miriam.
• I put the focus of this task primarily on developing, maintaining and seeing the execution of a Research Roadmap related to the AI strategy for editors.
• I made it clear that the focus is not an Applied Science roadmap but that I ask Miriam to lean on other leaders in the team for helping her with developing the roadmap which will include all of the work of the research team on this front.
• Miriam and I now have bi-weekly check-ins about this work for me to support her where she may benefit from it.

I'm moving this task to Backlog because the scoping is not completed. It will most likely need to still be prioritized for this quarter but it does not make sense to keep it in the quarterly lane given that conversations on iterations on it are ongoing.

High level summary of work done between July-September 2025:

• Output 1: NPOV guidance for researchers: We have proceeded as planned. We received community feedback on the draft and have improved the guidance informed by the feedback. We have not published the Guidance in a venue with DOI, yet (likely arxiv, and soon).
• Output 2: Methodology and case studies about contentious topics and NPOV. We posted the methodology for Output 2 on meta:Research on September 22. We presented and facilitated conversations about the methodology in multiple venues (e.g., NPOV Working Group, Wikimania 2025, Research team meeting, ...).
• Supported the organization on emerging requests related to this topic.

@Easikingarmager Thanks for putting the diff draft together. I labeled yours as Draft 1, and created a Draft 2 tab with my proposed changes. I ported the majority of your content from Draft 1 but you will see some changes in the opening parts. I assume the publication will be for when you're back from AoIR 2025. Good luck with the conference and the panel. :)

@KinneretG: we did a few iterations on the doc together. Thanks for your work on the feedback. I did my final pass now and left my final batch of comments. None are blockers for you to proceed. Thank you: the program has a good structure and logic and brings many of the things that we care about and want to see in such a program together. I appreciate your work through multiple iterations to improve it.

Thank you, Diego and Miriam, for the conversation today. My summary notes are below:

1. We have made a decision to conditionally (see point 2) publish the work on arxiv (roughly by mid-October). We can decide at a future point if we want to send the work to a peer-reviewed venue. At this point, it's lower priority to get peer-review on this particular message.
2. The two of you will brainstorm about whether there is a good discussion and future work section that can be built for the paper, i.e., whether based on this research and exploration we can have anchored and meaningful recommendations or thoughts on future research in this space. I will look to you to give me your recommendation about proceed with arxiv or stop here.
3. We agreed that one framing that can be helpful for our audiences is if we talk about the reality of the infrastructure we work with at this point (which can expand to some extent but not in any way close to where very large tech companies can expand theirs) and our commitments to how we develop and use AI models. This can be a grounded and inspirational message and also a formal record of how we handled this moment in time.

Congratulations everyone. I appreciate the collaboration across the group to arrive a deeper understanding and clarity about the focus of communication (recruitment as the core focus) and working hard to have a good paper we sent out of the door.

@Miriam Yes. I'm in alignment about these asks. two points:

1. I don't know if you want to share the exact document with them or not. If so, note that I proposed a change in title.
2. please resolve the open comments before sharing.

@KinneretG thanks for doing this work. Having you attending these events allows us to operate with a different level of knowledge and understanding in the future events. Also thanks to Eli for teaming up with you for CHI.

Based on my knowledge the only thing left is updating the website. Kinneret and I talked about it on Monday. @KinneretG I extended this task's deadline to give more time for that. Please resolve when done. thanks.

Resolving this task. Please re-open if there are remaining items.

My understanding is that this task is concluded. I'm going to resolve. Please feel free to re-open if something is remaining and update the due data and other relevant info. Thanks @DSaroyan_WMF for your support.

@KinneretG please review, update (and resolve?).

Overall key themes from the event:

• AI:
  1. Confirmation that the AI strategy for editors is focusing on what this group (for the most part) wants to see.
  2. Clarity in the space of AI and readership will be helpful. (something we knew we should work on after the first piece was out.)
  3. It is very important to engage with the community on this front. I see a lot of value for creating spaces where people can come together, share different perspectives and talk. My read of the different rooms on this topic is that we will benefit from creating such spaces, sharing and hearing each other.
  4. Having been exposed to all the hopes, fears, and needs of the community during Wikimania, I am even more eager for us to focus on implementing the AI strategy for editors. Editors need help and the areas of retrieval and moderation support are high priority for them.
• Users with Extended Rights
  1. Appreciation for creating the spaces for these users to connect, for the first time in this way.
  2. A nice suggestion by someone that perhaps next year we can bring UWER along with "potential UWER" to one place and help the two groups interface with one another, learn from each other, and support each other.
  3. For every community that aims to do an intervention on the admin front, it is important for us to invest in supporting them with data analyses so they can track their numbers. Even better, if they can run the codes themselves, we can create an "action package" and offer links to codes as part of that so they can run with it. I offered that all folks who want to take action to feel welcome to reach out to Eli, Claudia or Leila for an office hour conversation.
  4. My overall assessment is that editors on the ground (at least in some Wikipedias) will act on this research. it is on us to continue supporting them in ways that is appropriate for our roles.
• NPOV
  1. It was really good to be able to get a sense of folks on the ground about the NPOV work by the working group.
  2. After a few conversations, Steinsson's paper is a piece of research I'm actively thinking about.
  3. (this part is not research related and I have passed on the feedback to relevant folks in the working group) there seems to be a need for making some terminology clearer in the NPOV definition or a standard policy related to it. Terms like impartiality, fairness, unbiased, reliable, neutral, etc. can have different meanings in different fields and it's okay for us to use them, of course, but then we should say what we mean by them in the context of WP.
  4. Editors communicated frustration (mildly put) as they have had to deal with NPOV on contentious topics repeatedly over the past few years. The pressure on those on the ground is very much felt in these conversations.
• Readership:
  1. WMF to communicate relevant learnings from research on readers back to the communities.
  2. How can WMF and editors work together to build for readers? what are the roles and responsibilities of each group? This requires some thinking and designing for.
• Communication: within the Research team, there is opportunity for exploring our ways of communication to the different WP projects. There is a lot of love and ask for more research, and at the same time repeated requests for information about findings to be transferred to the communities in ways that they can use them in their work. With arwiki editor we explored the possibility of sharing some of the arwiki findings as part of Wiki Arabia, there was also asks for nuggets of findings to be shared throughout the year. It is important that we think about this and figure out if there is something new we want to experiment with.
• Global trends which inform annual planning (which Research contributes to but does not lead): I have some feedback that I'll pass along to the relevant teams.

August 9:

• Admin panel: I'll start by saying that as much as I know how committed Wikimania participants are, after having a pre-day for users with extended rights, talking about admin trends as part of the 5 research findings session, and the night before in a shuttle with a group of folks I was questioning how much engagement we get with this panel. My estimate of the participation is somewhere between 30-40, a good room size, and a lively conversation. I had 3 panelists from enwiki, ukwiki and itwiki and we had a good conversation about their perspectives wrt barriers for potential admins to become admins as well as ideas for experimentation. Good engagement and questions from the crowd as well. User:ata made a call for more experimentation to the community that stayed with me, and User:OhanaUnited emphasized the importance of motivation and also focusing on retention. Key topics that came up (as part of this session and the previous ones):
  1. need for more experimentation
  2. appreciation for research and WMF recognizing that the biggest impact should happen on the ground and will likely be policy based.
  3. appreciation for the research and repeated ask for future reports to be to-the-point and targeted to the specific audience (editors/admins/...).
  4. some specific ideas: termed adminship (nowiki, svwiki), breaking down admin tasks (further), recognizing current admins for higher retention, mentorship (via good mentors) to help potential admins become admins, temporary adminship (ukwiki), ... session info along with link to etherpad and slides (recordings will be posted in the coming days/weeks).
• Wikipedia readers (as part of a relevant session): There are two key learnings for me from this session:
  1. A reminder that editors do not know about readers unless WMF studies readers and tells editors about them. They were very open to this fact.
  2. We must continue thinking about ways to communicate the relevant pieces of our learnings about readers to editors. They are wary of large research reports. One idea that came up in the session is: "every once in a while show us a did you know x about readers" window, don't overwhelm us but give us critical information we should know and learn about. This particular solution may or may not be something that we implement, however, as part of serving "editors" I would like explore more about how we help them have the key information they need to do their work best. @DKumar-WMF let's talk about this at some point.
  3. The topic of human-centered design for readers and how to do that so that editors can come along on this journey was one, perhaps unspoken theme, of the panel. At the end the reality is that the Foundation has a few people on this topic (including Design, UX Research, Applied Science, ...). So the question is: how can this group learn about readers globally and how they can meaningfully engage editors for designing for readers. I see a lot of opportunities for WMF and editors to work more closely to serve readers in different ways. @DKumar-WMF cc.

August 8:

• State of Wikimedia Research session was back this year where Mako and Tilman presented 5 research associated with 5 themes from the Wikimedia research community. Well-attended and it was nice to see research that was presented as part of the Monthly Research Showcases or the WMF-RAY made it to the list. (I expect both slides and the recording be posted in the link in the coming weeks) @KinneretG cc.
• I had a good conversation with the organizers of Wikimania 2026 (Paris) for a possible Research track as part of the program, more similar to what we organized in 2019 in Sweden. My pitch is on their table to consider. We also discussed the possibility of a full-day event (pre-Wikimania or not), something that Jerome had proposed and tested the waters about as part of Wiki Workshop 2025. I look forward to learn in the coming couple of months what may be possible. (fwiw, I communicated that I'm interested in us doing something as high quality and ambitious as we did in Sweden, at the very least, or not doing anything in particular at all because it will be additional work and it makes sense to do it only if the quality is high and we can have more impact than the usual research label/track that gets attached to the Wikimania sessions that are research related.) @KinneretG
• Wikimedia Armenia has been organizing campaigns to help researchers contribute to scientific content on Wikipedia. @KinneretG you may be interested to be at least aware of this work and session. Susanna and I explored different funding options (she was wondering if that work is fundable via Research Fund and we concluded the general fund is more appropriate because the focus is on editing. I did share with her this WMF-RAY winner paper (b/c they don't get a lot of edits, yet).
• Research Meetup: and I forgot to say in August 7 report that Dariusz, Iolanda and I co-organized an informal Research Meet-up (thanks Kinneret for booking a timeslot). ~10-15 people joined. We each shared what was top of mind for us, where we needed help, and where we could offer help to one another. (etherpad) Some of the questions we tackled in the room:
  1. where can I publish my research?
  2. what is most important for me to consider when publishing my research?
  3. I need help organizing a research event. Who can help me with some of my questions about event organization?
  4. I have done research with a focus on a contentious topic. I have identified some editors who may have done questionable or inappropriate actions. Can I mention their username in my paper?
  5. and more
• Two enwiki admins shared the result of the updates in the enwiki RFA process (session). @Easikingarmager let's watch this space. The editors showed already some improvement in terms of recruitment numbers. This is important change that is happening on the ground and it would be good to keep an eye on it and see if the change in trends are to stay and also whether they will sufficiently compensate for the attrition in enwiki. And consider checking out the talk. They did a good job presenting how they brought this change to life on the ground.

August 7:

• Motivation: The team focused on improving the WikiLearn platform and its connection and impact is in search of the right way to motivate WikiLearn learners to learn the different skills through WikiLearn courses. Asaf hosted a workshop related to the topic.

All clear. thank you.

August 6:

• The day was light in session attendance for me and very much packed with hallway conversation and connecting with people on different topics.
• I attended PTAC's session and I appreciated the group's openness to share about how the past (almost 1 year) been for them as well as hearing the audience's questions who asked good questions about how PTAC had managed trade-offs and decision making (I especially appreciated the question that asked the group to give a specific example). A couple of things remained with me from that conversation: knowing that the group had faced some hard choices/trade-offs and that the group had access to data for decision making. I'm really appreciative of PTAC's willingness and commitment to try a different model of advising WMF for product and technology matters and look forward to see what the group decides about its future in the coming months.
• I had a couple of really good conversations with volunteers who are getting PhDs in topics squarely on or very related to the NPOV work. It was a good opportunity to share notes and brainstorm about how to approach reducing the complexity of research on NPOV given its very technical and layered definition. We also had some good conversations about the NPOV term (neutrality or impartiality or ... these each mean different things to different audiences in the world) and I connected relevant folks in the working group to the people interested to continue conversations.
• Fun fact: I was lucky to meet one of the researchers from India who has been following the Monthly Research Showcases for the past 12 months. It was a wonderful and serendipitous connection. Lots of appreciation and love from the researcher back to the team who organizes Research Showcases.
• Broken references on Wikipedia came up as a theme in multiple languages. The actual solution at a high level is not hard. In my conversations, editors already knew what sources had issues that they wanted to fix. so all they needed were two things: 1. a way to easily get a list of articles that have used the references in the languages of their choice (@fkaelin pinging you here given that you're looking at retrieval via LLMs, with higher tolerance for false-negative), 2. check if the link is broken, 3. give the alternative link (which they know it exists b/c the broken links they were interested in come from very large organizations that have moved content without redirects). I thought about this research proposal and will connect the volunteers to the research group to see if they want to pursue a collaboration.

Thanks, Claudia and Eli. Having looked at section 3.4.2 now, can you confirm that the Figure 1a in the report is for admin trends and not sysop trends?

@Isaac and @DDeSouza thank you for bringing it to the finish line.

August 4:

• Met with the WMF Board in the afternoon to host a conversation as well as listen in on other conversations. I shared back the learnings with the staff as relevant.

Weekly update:

@KinneretG moved this to in-progress as I'm closing the quarterly lane. Can you assign a deadline to this task and resolve once completed? thanks.

Weekly update:

• Kinneret has prepared a blurb for research.wikimedia.org which is with Mako and I for review.

We have made the following decisions:

• Design Research has determined that the team needs the Qualtrics services.
• Design Research has made the decision to accept the transfer of Qualtrics management from Applied Science to Design Research.

@Isaac given that the Asana task has been closed, Let's close this task and open it when we have an updated request for Legal. I'm going to be bold and just do it, if you have other info please re-open and update the task with next steps.

@Gehel: On our end @fkaelin is going to look into the directory and will clear you all here when we're ready for purging. If you want to follow up, please do so with fkaelin.

Isaac prepared the internal (private) doc for the upcoming report. Thanks, Isaac.

@DDeSouza please remove the Wiki Workshop button from the website. thanks.

@DSaroyan_WMF please update https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Technology_Fund/Wikimedia_Research_Fund#See_also and add the information about Research Fund 2024-25 (similar to the years prior). Thanks.

Based on an internal conversation this task is for Movement Insights and Product Analytics to make a prioritization decision about. I will remove Research's tag and add Product Analytics as a result.