Research:Newsletter

Wikimedia Research Newsletter

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The inaugural edition of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, published on July 25, 2011.

The Wikimedia Research Newsletter (WRN) covers research of relevance to the Wikimedia community. It has been appearing generally monthly since 2011, and features both academic research publications and internal research done at the Wikimedia Foundation. It is published as a section of The Signpost (titled "Recent research") and as a stand-alone article on Meta-Wiki.

Team edit

The newsletter was founded in 2011 by Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer at the Wikimedia Foundation. As of 2023, the core editorial team consists of Tilman (as the editor-in-chief), Masssly, Abdul Rafiu Fuseini (User:Alhaj_Darajaati), Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini (User:Dnshitobu), Musah Fuseini (User:Musahfm) and Fuseini Mugisu Suhuyini (User:Sir_Amugi). Over 90 bylined contributors have volunteered reviews and writeups since 2011.

The associated @WikiResearch Twitter/X feed, where almost all covered papers are posted first, is run by Miriam Redi and Tilman, and has almost 18,000 followers as of December 2023. It is also available on Mastodon.

How to subscribe edit

  • To receive the full text of each new issue in the form of an HTML email, sign up here.
  • The table of contents of each issue is cross-posted to the wiki-research-l mailing list.
  • Follow the @WikiResearch feed on   Twitter/X (also mirrored   on Facebook and on   mastodon.social). In addition to the monthly announcement of each new WRN issue, it also points to new preprints, papers or research-related blog posts before they are reviewed more fully in the upcoming issue.
  • The Newsletters are also included in Wikipedia's The Signpost newspaper (which appears monthly), so if you subscribe to The Signpost, you'll receive the newsletter with your regular Signpost delivery to your Wikipedia talk page.

Archives edit

Search the WRN archives edit


Examples: Find research involving administrators / vandalism / pageviews / gender / Wiktionary / reverts.

Volume 14 (2024) edit

Volume 13 (2023) edit

Volume 12 (2022) edit

Volume 11 (2021) edit

(The May 2021 issue was skipped.)

Volume 10 (2020) edit

Volume 9 (2019) edit

Volume 8 (2018) edit

(The December 2018 issue was skipped.)
(The March-April 2018 issues were skipped.)

Volume 7 (2017) edit

(The October–December 2017 issues were skipped.)

Volume 6 (2016) edit

Volume 5 (2015) edit


Volume 4 (2014) edit

  • WRN 4(12) – December 2014: Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting
  • WRN 4(11) – November 2014: Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures
  • WRN 4(10) – October 2014: Informed consent and privacy; newsmaking on Wikipedia; Wikipedia and organizational theories
  • WRN 4(9) – September 2014: 99.25% of Wikipedia birthdates accurate; focused Wikipedians live longer; merging WordNet, Wikipedia and Wiktionary
  • WRN 4(8) – August 2014: A Wikipedia-based Pantheon; new Wikipedia analysis tool suite; how AfC hamstrings newbies
  • WRN 4(7) – July 2014: Shifting values in the paid content debate; cross-language vandalism detection; translations from 53 Wiktionaries
  • WRN 4(6) – June 2014: Power users and diversity in WikiProjects; the "network of cultures" in multilingual Wikipedia biographies
  • WRN 4(5) – May 2014: Overview of research on Wikipedia's readers; predicting which article you will edit next
  • WRN 4(4) – April 2014: Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google; 43% of academics have edited Wikipedia
  • WRN 4(3) – March 2014: Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates; analysis of "In the news" discussions; user hierarchy mapped
  • WRN 4(2) – February 2014: CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism; like-minded editors clustered; Wikipedia stylistic norms as a model for academic writing
  • WRN 4(1) – January 2014: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years

Volume 3 (2013) edit

Volume 2 (2012) edit

  • WRN 2(12) – December 2012: Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined
  • WRN 2(11) – November 2012: Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons
  • WRN 2(10) – October 2012: WP governance informal; community as social network; efficiency of recruitment and content production; Rorschach news
  • WRN 2(9) – September 2012: "Rise and decline" of Wikipedia participation, new literature overviews, a look back at WikiSym 2012
  • WRN 2(8) – August 2012: New influence graph visualizations; NPOV and history; 'low-hanging fruit'
  • WRN 2(7) – July 2012: Conflict dynamics, collaboration and emotions; digitization vs. copyright; WikiProject field notes; quality of medical articles; role of readers; Best Wiki Paper Award
  • WRN 2(6) – June 2012: Edit war patterns, deleters vs. the 1%, never used cleanup tags, authorship inequality, higher quality from central users, and mapping the wikimediasphere
  • WRN 2(5) – May 2012: Supporting interlanguage collaboration; detecting reverts; Wikipedia's discourse, semantic and leadership networks, and Google's Knowledge Graph
  • WRN 2(4) – April 2012: Barnstars work; Wiktionary assessed; cleanup tags counted; finding expert admins; discussion peaks; Wikipedia citations in academic publications; and more
  • WRN 2(3) – March 2012: Predicting admin elections by editor status and similarity; flagged revision debates in multiple languages; Wikipedia literature reviewed
  • WRN 2(2) – February 2012: CSCW 2012 in review; gender gap and conflict aversion; collaboration on breaking news; effects of leadership on participation; legacy of Public Policy Initiative
  • WRN 2(1) – January 2012: Language analyses examine power structure and political slant; Wikipedia compared to commercial databases

Volume 1 (2011) edit


Until 2018, issues were also published on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog.

How to contribute edit

This newsletter would not be possible without contributions from the research and Wikimedia community. We welcome submissions of new projects, papers and datasets to be featured in the newsletter. Work on the upcoming edition is coordinated on an Etherpad, where you can suggest items to be covered, or sign up to write a review or summary for one of those that are already listed. Beyond that:

  • If you want your project to be featured, please create a new project page using the form on the research project directory.
  • If you have released code or data of relevance to research on Wikimedia projects, please contact us.

For anything else that might be of interest to our readers (such as events, CFPs, research blog posts) please get in touch or post an announcement to wiki-research-l (we are monitoring this list on a regular basis). Separately, see here for how to contact the Research department of the Wikimedia Foundation about collaborations etc.

We are also looking for contributors (either occasional or regular) for the newsletter. If you have reviewed recent Wikipedia literature or would like to help writing the newsletter, please contact us.

Open access vs. closed access publications edit

Complete references of the publications featured in the newsletter can be found at the bottom of each issue. We aim to include a link to a freely accessible version whenever possible. Publications that are not open access (i.e. behind a paywall or tied to institutional subscriptions) will be marked with a closed access icon:

Dalip, Daniel Hasan, Raquel Lara Santos, Diogo Rennó Oliveira, Valéria Freitas Amaral, Marcos André Gonçalves, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Raquel C.M. Minardi, and Jussara Marques de Almeida (2011). GreenWiki: A tool to support users' assessment of the quality of Wikipedia articles. In Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL '11), 469. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. DOI  .

Corpus of covered research publications edit

The inaugural issue of the WRN was published on July 25, 2011 – shortly after the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index and after two Signpost articles covering recent Wikimedia research.

The six issues published in the first volume (July–December 2011), featuring 87 unique publications, are available as a downloadable 45-page PDF, and a print version can be ordered from Pediapress. The full list of publications reviewed or covered in the Newsletter in 2011 can be browsed online or downloaded (as a BibTeX, RIS, PDF file or in other formats), ready to be imported into reference managers or other bodies of wiki research literature. Read more...

The twelve issues of the second volume (January–December 2012) covered 225 publications. This corpus can be browsed online on Zotero, or downloaded as BibTeX file from datahub.io. Read more...

Most of the publications covered in subsequent years, alongside some that have not been covered yet, are contained in less curated form in our Zotero library, comprising around 1800 items as of July 2020.

Contact edit

For general queries on the research newsletter other than project or paper contributions you can leave a message on the talk page, send a DM on Twitter/X, or email wikiresearch-contact at googlegroups.com.