User:Isaac (WMF)

Isaac Johnson, Senior Research Scientist

Isaac Johnson

Senior 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 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.

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
• 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
• WikiNav tool for exploring clickstream data (Outreachy project)
• List-building models
• Social media traffic report
• Differential privacy parameter exploration
• Search referral data for Wikipedia
• User scripts for visualizing link data

And specifically, a number of Python packages:

• mwparserfromhtml: parsing Wikipedia HTML (parsoid output)
• mwedittypes: structured analysis of wikitext 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
  • 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:
  • Various analysis "gotchas" when working with Wikimedia data
  • Aspects to consider when comparing/studying different Wikipedia language editions
  • Standard approaches to various Wikimedia research tasks

Projects

Last updated on 06/20/2025

Active Active projects that I am currently working on: Wikipedia Edit Types NLP Tools for Wikimedia Content Topic model updates Language switching on Wikipedia WikiNLP (ACL '25)

Completed Completed research projects and reports: Recommender Systems: Prioritization of Wikipedia articles Language-agnostic topic classification for Wikipedia articles Region inference for Wikipedia articles Wikidata topic classification (Outreachy project) Extending add-a-link to more languages Re-use of Wikimedia data: External reuse of Wikimedia content Report on how information modules on Search impact Wikipedia readership Social media traffic report Wikidata transclusion on English Wikipedia Knowledge Gaps: Demographics of Wikipedia readers Survey on the gender of editors Knowledge gaps taxonomy Explaining the Wikipedia reader gender gap Knowledge Integrity: Definition of moderation Crowdsourced content moderation Sockpuppet detection Sources on Wikipedia Miscellaneous: Differential privacy for Wikimedia data WikiNLP (EMNLP '24) Evaluating success for content translation (Outreachy project)

Backburner Projects that I've started, but had to put down for the moment: Entry points Structured data gap List-Building