Proposal: Establishing a research database

{{proposal|member1=John Vandenberg|member2=Kerry Raymond}}
This proposal is to support the establishment of a research database in Australia.

== Background ==
Australians have been undertaking research on Australia's use of English Wikipedia, however each time the research platform and data is not made available for others to reuse.  This results in similar start-up costs for each potential research project.

Australia is establishing many shared data and compute facilities, to allow researchers from different institutions to collaborate on research, and for different teams to carry on the prior work of others easily.

== Objectives ==
:''copied from Kerry's prose in the current Annual Plan''
The objectives are to make Wikipedia dumps and other Wikimedia related data sets available to Australian researchers and Australian Wikipedians in the belief that analysis of these data sets will enable the development of easily measurable key performance indicators in relation to Australian content and Australian editors which in turn enable better project monitoring and evidence-based decision-making within WMAU.

Longer term objectives might be in support of the WMF strategic priority around editor retention. Such a project might seek to identify patterns of Australian editor behaviour that are strongly correlated with an editor likely to cease contributing in the near future. Such patterns might provide insight into the circumstances that contribute to editor attrition and be the basis for strategies to increase editor retention.

== Budget ==
This proposal is for a budget of $12,500 to be allocated to the establishment of a research database.  The funds are to be prioritised for support for the establishment of a research database hosted in Australia that is available to all Australian academics. Once the research database has been established, the remainder of this $12,500 may be used to fund small adhoc research projects that are overseen by an Australian researcher competent in a relevant field, as a way of road-testing the infrastructure.

Kerry Raymond will be responsible for this budget, with all funding to be approved by resolution of the committee.