Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024

Two weeks ago I attended the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024, an annual conference focused on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in Central and Eastern European countries (also Central Asia). The event was organized by Wikimedia Community UG Türkiye and held at the very impressive Müze Gazhane (Gashouse Museum) at the heart of Kadıköy neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul (Turkey). The program included a number of sessions on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, open source software, free knowledge, and free content, covering both the social and technical aspects. I was invited by the organization committee for running a session on Research to support multilingual knowledge on Wikipedia.

Abstract
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation Research team is to develop models and insights utilizing scientific methods, and strengthen Wikimedia research communities in order to support technology and policy needs, and advance the understanding of the Wikimedia projects. In this lecture I will give an overview of recent research led by the team to address knowledge gaps and improve knowledge integrity on Wikipedia and sister projects. In particular, I will show novel machine learning models based on language-agnostic and multilingual approaches so that they can be used by researchers, developers and volunteers from any language community.

Attendees will have an up-to-date overview of the work conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation Research team. In particular, they will learn how they can leverage existing machine learning models for tasks of interest such as inferring the topic of a Wikipedia article, estimating the quality of a revision, or predicting its likelihood of being reverted. To illustrate the practical usefulness of these computational techniques, findings will be presented using data from popular projects among communities in the region of CEE. In addition, the final discussion will allow attendees to provide feedback to improve future work.

This was my first Wikimedia community event since I joined the WMF’s Research team in February 2021 (3.5 years ago). The wide range of timely and insightful topics included in the program and the many conversations I had with volunteers made this community event a deeply enriching experience. I look forward to attend more community events, as this did not only help to publicly share the work we are doing at WMF, but also to understand how it is perceived by the communities, to identify possible pathways for future research and, ultimately, to build trust between WMF staff and volunteers.