 I'm very pleased to announce or introduce the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the year or the WMF Ray, it's a little background name, and I'm doing this on behalf of, I mean my self and Lila who are the sort of committee that helped decide this, this is the third time, I think that's right, that we've done this award. It's been an honor to be able to come back to the workshop and present this now, it seems like it's an every year sort of thing, so alright let's go to the next slide. The WMFA Ray Award is an award which is given to recognize and celebrate some recent research work that has been published in the last year that has the sort of potential to really have a significant impact on Wikimedia projects and research and it's given to research that are using Wikimedia data to understand and improve Wikimedia projects or the broader web ecosystem and which answer sort of critical open questions that face the Wikimedia community. The committee is myself and Lila who you all heard from a little bit already and sort of the papers are eligible to the extent that they sort of are on or about or use data from or importance to Wikimedia projects, they have to be published in the previous calendar year and they have to have a copy which is available in English and then of course they can't be something which is written by one of our collaborators. So they have to be written by someone else, just two backs, our collaborators do some great work, including some of the number of people that are here listening. This year we had close to 200 different publications which we considered. There's a lot of Wikimedia scholarship including a lot that you've seen today, perhaps future candidates for the award. We had a public call for nominations and a number of people submitted suggestions to us. We also went through all of the research that was sort of tweeted over the last year by the Wikibere search Twitter handle which you should definitely be following if you are not and then just to make sure we didn't miss anything. We do a pretty extensive Google scholar search where we sort of after having gone through all these things to make sure that we haven't missed anything. All right let's go to the next slide. There is a physical award and a certificate probably a bunch of you know that Wikimedians give each other these virtual awards called barn stars which are little pictures which are made to look like physical things which are little decorations that you attach to barns and because they are also physical things you can acquire a physical barn star and we have in fact we are in the business of doing this. We will be sending physical barn stars to each of the winning paper research groups. They are very heavy so if we can send it flat rate this is like a good use of that particular trick. We will be in contact about that. So I think that if you failed to get a physical award in the past year I know that we had some trouble actually getting these out. Let us know. I think everyone will be getting that. And then I think that that is sort of the introduction of the award. So the awards are going to be introduced as you perhaps saw in the introductory slide by Jimmy Wales and the process is going to be that Jimmy is going to introduce each of these awards and he is going to sort of summarize the paper and sort of reveal the winner and talk about why it was sort of important. And then we are going to invite everybody to sort of unmute and clap. I will come and do that. And then we will invite the authors to you know share any responses they have and talk for a couple minutes. And with that I am ready to turn it over to Jimmy. Great. Well thanks for having me. I apologize I am actually in an airport which still feels very strange post pandemic to be in an airport. So if they start making announcements or something we might have a little awkwardness for a moment. But here we go. So for the first WMF Ray best paper one of the most discussed challenges faced by the Wikimedia movement is the fact that their systemic bias both in what is covered in Wikimedia projects and in how it is covered. These are typically described as content gaps. Among the most discussed content gaps is related to gender especially as it relates to biographical articles in Wikipedia. Over the past decade researchers have attempted to answer such questions as how the number of biographies of women compared to men on Wikipedia. How biographies that exist differently systematically based on the gender of the subject. Whether the differences between the number of biographies is a result of systemic bias in Wikipedia. And what the barriers for inclusion of content about women and non-binary groups in Wikipedia are. One of the most important steps of conducting research on these types of questions is choosing a set of Wikipedia articles to compare. As you may imagine the choice of article matters and sometimes that choice can result in different and even contradictory findings. The authors of the paper on this slide have created an important new approach to this problem. In particular they've developed a novel methodology for studying bias in Wikipedia biographies. Given a target corpus of biographies the method uses the Wikipedia category system to construct a comparison corpus that matches the target in as many attributes as possible. The work also describes an approach for evaluation of bias in a general way. And the work demonstrates this method by showing disparities in biographies in various ways that have been difficult or impossible to do at scale in the past. This includes in terms of gender beyond CIS women, in terms of race, in terms of intersectional identities. In doing so the authors revisited some of the findings in the gender content gap literature and affirmed or challenged previous findings. For all these reasons we award this year's first WMF Ray 2023 Best Paper Award to Controlled Analyses of Social Biases in Wikipedia Bios. All right well everyone I'm going to invite everyone to unmute and give a round of applause for the authors. Very good very good all right. Now's the opportunity I mean if the just you want to give the if we have we have at least one of the authors here I believe right yes so Anjali. Yeah um I'll just say thank you so much for this honor um we're we're so excited about this uh I think when we started on this project it was um we thought it was going to be kind of a footnote in a different paper and then it turned out to be a really hard problem that took multiple years of revisions um until we got to this paper so um we're so excited to kind of see where this work has gone um one of the things that uh Tan and Kevin and Julie and I talked a lot about while working on this project is how exciting it is to be able to work with Wikipedia data and how this is a community where there's such potential to have kind of real impact and really see research translated into practice um because there's this amazing community of both researchers and contributors and because the platform is kind of so conducive to be able to do research so um we're really excited that our work can hopefully contribute to this community so thank you so much okay so shall I move on to the next one Mako let's do it yeah let's do it okay I think we wanted to take a sorry turn it up I think we want to take a group shot oh take a group shot yes let's take a group photo okay all right everybody I think this is this is what this is what qualifies as a group photo put it back on the slide okay who's doing the photo are you doing it Leila? Hold on I can do this okay all right let us know when you have it okay one two three got it great okay now we're ready to move on okay great okay so now for the the second WM of Ray Best Paper Award while characterizing content gaps is a critical piece of any attempt to close them it's only the first step and indeed members of the wikimedia community have been working hard to close content gaps for many years in the English wikimedia community two of the most common attempts to close the gender gap for content are the art and feminism project and the 500 women's scientist project between the two of them these projects have contributed to thousands of wikimedia biographies of women particularly through edited thoughts our second winner provides a thorough scientific evaluation of these two attempts to address the content divide for gender in particular it collects data on thousands of biography of women artists scientists athletes and politicians that were worked on by the new projects carefully constructs a data set of otherwise similar biographies of men which it uses as a comparison it evaluates the results of the content improvement efforts by comparing the length quality and visibility the biographies in articles worked on by the two interventions and the comparisons that it also evaluates the interventions in terms of the degree to which the articles are linked from other articles and the amount of material about the subjects that are put into info boxes the paper finds that these efforts have been quite successful in writing biographies of women that are longer higher quality and viewed more than the comparison articles it also finds that the articles worked on be these projects lag behind the comparison group and several other respects that may limit the visibility of these articles for example they are less integrated into intra wikipedia link network in doing so it provides both scientific evidence on the effectiveness of an important wiki media community project focused on gender equity while also pointing toward ways that those efforts can be improved in the future for all of these reasons we award this year's second to be afraid 2022 best paper award to the gender divided wikipedia quantifying and assessing the impact of two feminist interventions all right and with that let me want to invite the authors to reveal them their video and i guess isabel is here and then everyone should unmute and give isabel a round of applause congratulations congratulations thank you thank you this is uh i'm so grateful to receive this uh and to be recognized you know wikipedia research is some of my favorite research out there um this is just a wonderful wonderful recognition of our work and also the work of um the the two movements that we look at here and i really want to shout out art and feminism and 500 women scientists for you know being being so active in uh intervening and producing kind of content that has long been missing from wikipedia um and providing you know the basis of the work um that we were able to do and i encourage anyone to kind of get involved and start uh writing or as we find uh start linking which is really really underdeveloped amongst a lot of um women's articles kind of keeping them periphery so um i hope this work is useful and i and i thank you again on behalf of uh sandra and myself congratulations all right so let's do the group photo all right uh there was just like a um uh congratulations again uh to to to all the authors um there was just uh there's just such a you all know after you know a day like today there's just so much really fantastic media scholarship being produced and i think that you know trying to trying to pick a best uh a best paper uh is is an impossible task perhaps but it's really it's just a it's a pleasure to be able to read all this work and it's and it's a pleasure to be able to recognize some of the really really fantastic stuff so um it's being produced so great work uh everybody and uh wonderful yeah cool and thank you jimmy for making time for it and coming from the airport uh that's good i enjoy this sort of thing uh i'm really i'm actually i'm very excited about this area of work in the wiki media movement for gender equity and what i loved uh just personally in reading through this is just the imminent practicality of it uh so in the first paper the idea of getting to a more consistent and more theoretically sound way of making comparisons i think will be more persuasive to those in the community who say may sometimes look at contradictory results and not be quite sure what to make of it and then the second which i think will really have an impact on those two interventions those two groups seeing the results of all their hard work being validated which will inspire other people to say oh i've got my my own gender equity issue that i want to work on and if i make an intervention it will matter uh so thank you it's wonderful stuff all right i think that i believe that that is that that is the awards i'm i think we're passing it over to uh back to you leila or to bomb