It has been almost 10 years since I arrived in Barcelona for working as a research engineer at Fundació Barcelona Media (research scientist at Eurecat after a few years). Many things have happened since then: discovering that social media analysis techniques could help to understand social and political phenomena, co-founding the DatAnalysis15M research network, contributing to EU-funded research projects on digital democracy and data sovereignty like D-CENT or DECODE, enrolling in a PhD program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra to characterize online participation in civic technologies, supporting the Decidim project and launching the Democratic Innovation Lab of Barcelona, becoming a research collaborator at Medialab-Prado and a visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, travelling around the world to share research findings while also learning from very inspiring communities in Mexico, Taiwan, Poland…
All these activities have been exciting but a new adventure begins today: I am joining the Wikimedia Foundation as a research scientist! This position — strongly committed to the principles of free knowledge, open source and open data, transparency, privacy, and collaboration — focuses on conducting applied research on the integrity of content and disinformation in Wikipedia and its sister projects. Wikipedia celebrated 20 years in January 2021 and I cannot imagine any other challenge as inspiring as contributing as a researcher to preserve the reliability of the main knowledge infrastructure on the Web.
Pablo Aragón 