Research at the Wikimedia Foundation to advance knowledge equity

The mission of the Wikimedia Research Team is to support and advance the understanding of Wikipedia and its sister projects. In this talk, Martin Gerlach will give an overview of their recent research to address knowledge gaps in Wikimedia projects. This program is rooted in the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goal for 2030 towards knowledge equity, which aims to break down barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. Martin will showcase different examples of how they use data and develop models to identify, measure, and bridge knowledge gaps. He will also describe how these research insights are used in practice to, e.g., support new products in order to empower millions of readers and contributors.

Martin Gerlach is a Senior Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. His research focus is in the field of computational social science combining tools from network science, machine learning, and statistical physics with the aim of improving the Wikimedia projects by identifying and quantifying the gaps in knowledge, understanding its readers and how they navigate, and making it easier for editors to contribute. He obtained a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University prior to joining Wikimedia Foundation.