User:Isaac (WMF)

Isaac Johnson

Research Scientist, Wikimedia Foundation

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 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.

Disclaimer: I work for or provide services to the Wikimedia Foundation, and this is the account I try to use for edits or statements I make in that role. However, the Foundation does not vet all my activity, so edits, statements, or other contributions made by this account may not reflect the views of the Foundation.

Contact me

• email: isaac@wikimedia.org
• irc: isaacj
• twitter: @_isaaclj
• phabricator: @Isaac
• github: @geohci

Tools

A collection of tools that I've built (or helped build) for showcasing some of our research work:

• Language-agnostic content tagging models
• List-building models
• Social media traffic report
• Differential privacy parameter exploration
• Search referral data for Wikipedia
• User scripts for visualizing link data

Musings

Various writings about topics relevant to Wikimedia data, research, etc.

• Trade-offs between performance and sustainability in language modeling for Wikimedia
• Potential content tagging models for Wikimedia
• Various analysis "gotchas" when working with Wikimedia data
• Standard approaches to various Wikimedia research tasks
• Aspects to consider when comparing/studying different Wikipedia language editions

Projects

Last updated on 03/30/2022

Active Active projects that I am currently working on: Prioritization of Wikipedia articles Region inference for Wikipedia articles Knowledge gaps taxonomy Differential privacy for Wikimedia data Wikipedia Edit Types Sources on Wikipedia

Completed Completed research projects and reports: Language-agnostic topic classification for Wikipedia articles Report on how information modules on Search impact Wikipedia readership mwsql Python library for processing SQL dumps (Outreachy project) WikiNav tool for exploring clickstream data (Outreachy project) Social media traffic report Wikidata transclusion on English Wikipedia Demographics of Wikipedia readers Survey on the gender of editors Wikidata topic classification (Outreachy project) Evaluating success for content translation (Outreachy project)

Backburner Projects that I've started, but had to put down for the moment: Language switching on Wikipedia Sockpuppet detection Entry points External reuse of Wikimedia content