Research:Labs2/FAQ
Who can participate?
[edit]Everyone! L2 is intended to democratize data analysis, exploration, experimentation and new tool development related to Wikimedia projects and open collaboration, generally. Anyone who is interested enough to find this FAQ is welcome to participate.
How do I get started?
[edit]Add your username to the member list to be notified of events. Check out the current list of project ideas and active projects to see if one interests you or feel free to start a project idea of your own. You might also consider signing up for mail:wiki-research-l, a mailing list for Wiki researchers, or stopping by our IRC channel on freenode: #wikimedia-labs2connect.
What do L2 members do?
[edit]We discuss project ideas, developed experimental software, perform quantitative & qualitative analyses and write about it here on meta. We hold regular hackathons where we work on projects together. We often start by proposing and supporting project ideas. Once we're ready to start work, we make a project page to report our progress.
What kind of support do projects need?
[edit]It depends a lot on what the project is intended to accomplish. If the idea is to develop a tool, someone will have to write the software (e.g., Software for quick processing of Wikidumps). If the idea is to perform a quantitative analysis, someone is going to have to get the data and perform the requisite statistics/visualization (e.g., Newcomer survival models). Often, a project will need a group of people to help perform a qualitative analysis (i.e., using your eyeballs. e.g., Newcomer quality). Most project ideas will list the support needed.