leila
Hi. My name is Leila. I am the Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation and I lead the research direction of the organization. I joined WMF in 2014 as a Research Research Scientist and since then have been involved in a variety of research initiatives at different capacities. These days my primary focus is supporting the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation to conduct research in support of the Wikimedia Movement and to strengthen the Wikimedia research community. You can learn about the team's work at: https://research.wikimedia.org/report.html. I'm an affiliate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
You can learn more about me at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LZia_(WMF).
Sessions
We share 5 key findings from our research on the Wikimedia projects during the past year that you can utilize in your work. We then facilitate spaces where Wikimedians can share their perspective and knowledge about each of the key findings, exchange proposals for how to use them in their work, and optionally propose follow-up next steps to bring the findings to their work or the work of their communities.
A report released by the WMF Research Team in January 2025[1] showed that the majority (13 of 21) larger language versions of Wikipedia are losing administrators. The study also concluded that the most impactful site for interventions lies in efforts to increase the inflow of new administrators. The goal of this panel is to bring together experts from Wikipedia communities and the WMF to discuss and share ideas for what can be done in response to declining numbers of administrators on many large language versions of Wikipedia. This may include discussion and critique of recommendations included in the WMF Research Team’s report, but also other ideas for policy-based interventions and other ways the WMF may be able to support administrators. Moreover, we hope to encourage sharing of community-based efforts at increasing the number of new active administrators.