Research newsletters

[Poetlister]

Does anyone ever look at the monthly research newsletter?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Researc ... /2015/June

It should provide material for at least one thread in most months.

[thekohser]

Does anyone ever look at the monthly research newsletter?

I have described it as "a well-done deliverable by WMF employee Tilman Bayer (credit where it's due!)".

[Rogol Domedonfors]

Hmm. I venture to disagree. I have just been criticising a specific review by Aaron Halfaker in another thread. My impression is that there is an overwhelming tendency to give positive reviews to publications that put Wikipedia and the other projects in a good light, and to be aggressively negative about publications that do not. I had an energetic exchange over a review from August 2016 which commented, in a throwaway line, that "this sets an example for engineers and computer-science engineers, who often show a lack of awareness of certain ethical issues in their research". I have a standing challenge to WMF staff to retract that slur on the professionalism of an entire dscipline of researchers and practitioners, and to demonstrate the WMF ethical training programme. Strangely enough, this was not taken up.

[thekohser]

...to be aggressively negative...

I read the review you are talking about. I didn't conclude on my own that its tone was "aggressively negative".

[Kingsindian]

I look at the newsletter occasionally, and have mentioned here some of the things appearing in it (the most recent one was the thread on crowdsourcing). I forget to check it regularly though. There's lots of decent material, and many papers contain literature reviews pointing to past work, which can be useful. However, like a lot of academic activity, a fair bit of it is crap, or at least uninteresting to me.