User:Isaac (WMF)
About me
I joined the the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation on October 2018 as a Research Scientist. I currently live in the glorious New York City, NY, USA.
My work
My background is in geography and human-computer interaction, with a special focus on understanding (and trying to do something about) how structural inequalities find their way online and into algorithmic systems. Since joining WMF, I have also been heavily involved in research towards better understanding reader needs and behavior, how to model and make predictions about Wikimedia content in a language-agnostic manner, and the impact of external re-use of Wikimedia content.
Tools
A collection of tools that I've built (or helped build) for showcasing some of our research work:
- Exploring clickstream data (Outreachy project): https://wikinav.toolforge.org/
- Filtering article lists to find good candidates for editing (Outreachy project and 2026 Coolest Tool Award winner): https://microtask-generator.toolforge.org/
- Social media traffic report (deprecated)
- Search referral data for Wikipedia (deprecated)
- User scripts for visualizing link data
And specifically, a number of Python packages:
- mwparserfromhtml: parsing Wikipedia HTML (parsoid output)
- mwedittypes: structured analysis of Wikipedia edit diffs
- mwtokenizer: word / sentence tokenization for Wikimedia content
- mwsql: parsing Wikimedia SQL dumps
Musings
Various writings about topics relevant to Wikimedia data, research, etc.
- Language modeling:
- Different ways of categorizing language models at Wikimedia
- Wikimedia data for AI: A review of Wikimedia datasets for NLP tasks and AI-assisted editing
- Research opportunities around datasets and core content policies
- Trade-offs between performance and sustainability in language modeling for Wikimedia
- Potential content tagging models for Wikimedia
- Data gaps that inhibit equitable and effective ML for the Wikimedia projects
- Data practices:
Projects
Last updated on 08/03/2026
Active
Active projects that I am currently working on:
- Understanding barriers to newcomer retention
- Wikipedia edit types
- Exploration of automated source verifiability checks
Completed
Completed research projects and reports:
- Recommender Systems:
- Re-use of Wikimedia data:
- Knowledge Gaps:
- Knowledge Integrity:
- Miscellaneous:
Backburner
Projects that I've started, but had to put down for the moment: