Martin Gerlach
Martin Gerlach
Senior Research Scientist, Wikimedia Foundation

About me

Hi. My name is Martin, I joined the Wikimedia Foundation in September 2019 as a Research Scientist in the Research team. My background is in Physics where I worked on trying to understand the dynamics of complex social systems. I currently live and work (mostly) in Berlin, Germany.

My work

My work focuses on Knowledge Gaps in order to understand and address structural inequalities in Wikimedia projects and the online ecosystem more generally. I have been contributing to this program in three main areas: i) understanding readers and how they are navigating in Wikipedia; ii) developing models for structured tasks to make it easier to newcomer editors to contribute; and iii) developing models to reliably assess the readability of content in Wikipedia. For more details about ongoing and past projects see below.

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and this is the account I intend 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

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Projects

A collection of things that I have been working on.


Tools

Some of the tools that I have (helped) develop.

  • List-building models This tool allows one to build a list of related articles to a "seed" based on various models.
  • WikiNav This tool provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content when learning about a given topic using the clickstream dataset. See also our post in the Wikimedia Tech-blog
  • Readability tool This tool provides scores about an article's readability in different languages (under development)
  • Wiki-Visibility tool This tool provides recommendations to increase the visibility of orphan articles.

Some python packages that make it easier to work with Wikimedia data:


Ongoing projects


Completed projects


Dissemination

Papers:

Blogposts

Talks