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:

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.

Projects

Last updated on 11/16/2023

Active

Active projects that I am currently working on:

Completed

Completed research projects and reports:

Backburner

Projects that I've started, but had to put down for the moment:

More