Privacy in Public: Navigating Research, Personal Data, and Safety on Wikipedia

Readers access Wikipedia articles more than 15 billion times every month, but the usage of Wikipedia does not stop here. Researchers frequently use Wikipedia related data for developing models, insights, and as part of research and development workflows. On average, every year researchers use or refer to Wikipedia in more than 130,000 articles and publish a minimum of roughly 500 articles about Wikipedia itself. The amount and diversity of the usage of Wikipedia in research projects has resulted in significant insights and improvements in Wikipedia itself as well as in other aspects of our lives (e.g., through machine translation). However, conducting research using Wikipedia has its own challenges, both for researchers, Wikipedia community members, and Wikimedia Foundation. In this paper we focus on one of the most frequent topics we observe the Wikipedia community and researchers having to grapple with: privacy. Our aim with this work is to help researchers and Wikipedia contributors see the challenges each group faces in their work. We further offer recommendations about what to pay attention to and how to navigate some of the questions we expect Wikipedia contributors and researchers face when interfacing with or conducting research projects.