Today, Phoebe Ayers of the Wikimedia Foundation board and a member of the WikiSym steering committee opened the second day of WikiSym + OpenSym 2013. She introduced Dario Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation, who talked about Wikipedia research and how the foundation supports it.

Phoebe also remembered John Riedl, a researcher extraordinaire and a member of the WikiSym community, who died of melanoma last month. John and his research group made many contributions to WikiSym, including papers that won best paper awards:

• 2011: WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance (with Shyong Lam, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David Musicant and Loren Terveen)
• 2009: rv you’re dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History (with Michael Ekstrand)

John, you will be missed.

John Riedl by Nicole Holdorph (CC BY SA)