Research:Skills matrix

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The goal of this page is to create and maintain a skills matrix for people doing research-related work at (or with) the Wikimedia Foundation. It was inspired by the skills matrix of the Release Engineering team.

The goal of a skills matrix is to identify areas of strength and weakness in a team, so as to mitigate single points of failure, surface learning opportunities, and make it easier for team members (as well as third parties) to identify experts who might be able to help with a particular topic.

A skills matrix is different from (but complementary to) a responsibility matrix, which identifies who is in charge of doing what in a group.

How to go about doing this[edit]

Step 1: Identify and agree on what we want to list as skills. ← We are here.
Step 2: Make a table
Step 3: Let people add their assessments of their skills to the table

Skills[edit]

This is a preliminary, messy, biased and incomplete list of skills to be matched to the people listed above. Edit, merge, reorganize and expand freely. This list may be too granular; we can decide later what to include, what to leave out, or what to spit out to another table.

General disciplines

Computer science
Sociology
Social Psychology
Evaluation
Statistics and data science
Online communities

Sub-fields

Mathematical optimization
Game theory
Cross-Cultural
Group Dynamics
Applied Research

Data analysis

Qualitative Data Analysis
Social Network Analysis
Analysis of A/B tests
Time series analysis / forecasting
Bayesian statistics
Data mining (machine learning)

Wikimedia-specific topics

Institutional knowledge of the WMF
Institutional knowledge of the Wikimedia movement
CentralNotice
Translate extension
Labs and Tool Labs
Stats machines
System administration
Wikimedia Programs
Wikimedia Affiliates

Data extraction

SQL
XML dumps
MediaWiki API
HiveQL/UDFs
Wikimetrics

Data manipulation

dplyr+tidyr in R
data.table in R

Tools and languages

R
Python
Python data analysis tools (IPython, Pandas, Jupyter)
JavaScript
Qualtrics
SPSS
Nvivo

Data visualization

D3
R (ggplot2)
Vega
Graph extension
WebGL
Kumu
Adobe

Surveys

Survey design
Survey implementation

User research

Usability testing

People[edit]

This is a preliminary list of WMF employees, contractors and fellows based on the Staff and contractors page and attendees of the weekly "Research group meeting". Feel free to remove yourself from this list if you'd rather not be listed. If you're not listed but feel you should, please do add yourself. For example, it might make sense for Product managers, or relevant Ops/Analytics staff, to be on this list as well.

How to go about doing this[edit]

Skills[edit]

People[edit]

See also[edit]