User:Marcmiquel

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Marc Miquel-Ribé
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ca-N Aquest usuari és un parlant natiu de català.
es-5 Esta persona tiene un conocimiento profesional del español.
en-4 This user has near native speaker knowledge of English.
it-3 Questo utente può contribuire con un livello avanzato in italiano.
ro-3 Acest utilizator poate contribui cu un nivel avansat de română.
fr-1 Cet utilisateur dispose de connaissances de base en français.
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Hi!

My name is Marc Miquel. I'm from Igualada, a small city near Barcelona, Catalonia. I went to the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, where I studied Telecommunication Eng. and a MSc Master's degree in Applied Telecommunications and Engineering Management. At the same time, I also studied a Humanities BA at the Open University of Catalonia. I got my PhD at the Pompeu Fabra University in Communication (Human-Computer Interaction), where I researched without funding different aspects of Wikipedia editor engagement and the content diversity (i.e. culture gap, geography gap, etc.). Following that, in 2016 I joined the TecnoCampus Mataró-Maresme / Pompeu Fabra University where I've been teaching User Experience, Game balance, Human-Computer Interaction, Quality Assurance, among other topics. At the same time, I've also been researching on content diversity in collaboration with researchers from the research centre Eurecat to set up the project Wikipedia Diversity Observatory.

Some of the projects I’ve been involved in have been strongly oriented towards a better society. Aside from Wikimedia, I got involved in a project to fight Dark User Experience named Dark Patternsdarkpatterns.org, "interfaces designed to trick you". I contributed to launch the first version of the website and wrote some articles in UX Magazine and a book chapter about the topic to support the project and reflect on the ethics of design. I am also a game designer, and I had the chance to design and publish some games both digital and physical (two card games to explain Catalonia’s culture in a funny way).

Wikimedia[edit]

I am a Wikipedian since 2010 when I joined the Catalan community and became a member of Amical Wikimedia (the Catalan Chapter). At Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, I presented my first research study on cultural diversity. Even though I have created several articles, some translations from other languages, some thousands of edits in Wikidata, I soon realized I could serve better the community and the movement through other activities than editing. In Amical Wikimedia, I organized several surveys to understand the motivations and opinions of the Catalan community and give support to events and activities. In the movement, I soon became enthusiastic about researching diversity in Wikipedia content according to different topics (e.g. culture, gender, geography, ethnic group, etc.). In fact, both diversity and editor engagement became the focus of my PhD dissertation.

In 2017, I created the Diversity Observatory, a space to study Wikipedia's content diversity, discuss the strategic needs, and propose solutions to improve it. The project provides data, research publications, visualizations and tools to monitor the content gaps and work towards bridging them in Wikipedia language editions. The project is currently in development thanks to a project grant, and it provides dashboards with graphs and tools to addresses the gaps and biases related to culture, geography, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic groups, among others.

Later, in 2019, I became involved in the Wikimedia 2030 Strategy process, initially in the Diversity Working Group. Then, I joined the final group of Writers, where I became especially involved in the writing and refining of the final set of principles and recommendations. I pushed especially for the principle "people-centeredness", which puts people's needs on the spot, and I think it is essential to improve the Wikimedia projects' user experience, give safety to Wikimedians, and help them navigate and store the internal knowledge of the movement to grow communities larger and more diverse (interview).

In addition to the previous Diversity Observatory research project, I am part of the team who started and supported the project Community Health metrics, which aims at characterizing and understanding editor retention and drop-off.

From July 2020 until January 2021 I served Amical Wikimedia as Chair of its board during a process of internal debate to trace a new path for the future of the Catalan Chapter.

In late-2020 I had the curious honour to propose the winning name for the sister project Wikifunctions. In hindsight, the merit was not my originality, but being the quickest to say it :).

During the year 2021, I set out to do (at least) an article on Romanian culture' for 100 days (emulating the challenge 100 wikidays). After doing the first one hundred articles/days, I got excited and ended up doing the whole year of Romanian translations and English to Catalan, a total of more than a thousand articles and 365 wikidays (list). A great way to get to know the country of half my family, and grow Wikipedia!

In 2021, I also collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundation Research team project Knowledge Gaps Index supporting the creation of a content gaps monitoring tool.

Selected Research Publications[edit]

I've been researching Wikipedia for a few years now, in aspects as diverse as the diversity of content, the involvement of publishers, or the movement's strategy. Here are some of my latest posts for anyone interested in:

If you want to collaborate on any project regarding diversity, user experience, community health or have any enquiry regarding any other topic, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. E-mail: marcmiquel (at) gmail.com