Research:Wikimedia at Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
This project will build ecosystems of collaboration between Wikipedians and computational social scientists in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Nigeria by developing research about the Wikimedia movement as part of the annual two-week Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. Wikipedians will meet virtually with early career scientists, join in-person summer institutes, and shape novel research projects that receive training and support from the Citizens and Technology Lab. The outputs of this grant will be research projects, relationships between Wikipedians and scientific organizations, pilot evidence for future grant proposals from scientific funders, and growth opportunities for the next generation of computational social scientists.
About the Team
[edit ]CAT Lab is a nonprofit and research lab at Cornell University that works together with online communities for a flourishing internet. CAT Lab has worked with many different language Wikipedia groups over the years. The lab is funded through donations from individuals and charitable foundations. It does not take funds from-for profit corporations.
Since 2017, the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS) have convened scholars from computational social sciences (CSS) in over 50 locations around the world, providing over 1,200 early career researchers with training and creating over 120 research collaborations.
Wiki In Africa is a South Africa-based non-profit that activates projects that are designed to ensure that African ways of knowing are valued, visible, and free for the world to access.
Goals
[edit ]In the short term, our goal is to develop novel Wikimedia-based research projects that benefit both local CSS scholars and local Wikimedia groups by developing research that is relevant to both parties. We will also train the next generation of rising computational social scientists in the norms of Wikipedia, questions important to the movement, and how to use Wikipedia data.
In the longer term, our goal is to build lasting relationships and ongoing collaborations between CSS scholars across Africa and local Wikimedians. The Wikimedia movement needs more people who can study and improve the social processes taking shape within Wikimedia projects with social science and data analysis skills. CSS scholars are often looking for detailed, high-quality, and often longitudinal data for research on communication, technology, political science, and other fields. Historically, while much of this data has come from corporate social media platforms, many have limited access to their data over the past years, creating a "data vacuum" for CSS researchers that Wikimedia Research would be well positioned to fill.
By focusing on Wikimedians and CSS scholars across Africa, we aim to increase Wikimedia studies done in local contexts and languages that are still underrepresented in science and across Wiki projects.
We believe there is a potentially powerful opportunity in the future for SICSS, scientific funders, and the Wikimedia movement to integrate shared research into the wider global SICSS curriculum and community. We see this first project as the beginning of something that, if successful, could attract external funding and more involvement from a wider set of summer schools.
Timeline
[edit ]The three summer institutes take place during the following dates:
- Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), August 10 to August 21, 2026
- Nairobi (Kenya):Dr. Amos Langat -Host , June 15 to June 26, 2026
- Uyo (Nigeria), July 20 to July 31, 2026
Curriculum and Example Projects
[edit ]CAT Lab is working with the summer schools to develop curriculum for doing computational social science with Wikipedia data. This curriculum will support learners to responsibly query data from the API, construct reliable analyses of that data, and develop their own research projects. We will be developing this curriculum by adapting the analysis from the paper "The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds" to the question of the gender of biographies on Wikipedia.
We plan to release the curriculum and teaching materials using a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Any code we share with students will be licensed under the MIT license.
Policy, Ethics and Human Subjects Research
[edit ]The summer school will train students in observational data analysis of public data on Wikipedia. The ethics of the overall summer school project are grounded in the relationships we will develop between Wikipedians and researchers. We expect that any research that students undertake will happen in conversation with Wikipedia communities.
Outputs
[edit ]CAT Lab will produce openly licensed training materials and slides in English and French for CSS students to learn how to work with Wikipedia data, building on existing resources available within the movement.
We expect that some student teams will further develop their project into a research paper that they publish as a whitepaper or submit to peer reviewed scholarly venues.
SICSS leaders, CAT Lab, and WikiInAfrica will produce a report describing Wikimedia-related research projects that were brainstormed at each SICSS location, insight into which open research questions exist at the intersection of CSS scholars and local Wikimedians, and lessons for future summer schools.
SICSS student participants will work with site leaders and participating Wikimedians to produce one blog post for diff.wikimedia.org per site that describes the experience and the topics that students took on.
SICSS leaders and CAT Lab also plan to provide a short communication that links to these posts in the Wikimedia Research and Wikimedia Education newsletters. We will also circulate these posts to the global SICSS community.
Resources
[edit ]We will post resources as they are available.
- Our (work-in-progress) practical teaching materials are online