Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, a main source of knowledge for a large fraction of Internet users, and one of the very few projects that make not only their content but also many activity logs available to the public. Furthermore, other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, have been created to share other types of knowledge with the world for free. For a variety of reasons (quality and quantity of content, reach in many languages, process of content production, availability of data, etc.) such projects have become important objects of study for researchers across many subfields of the computational and social sciences, such as social network analysis, artificial intelligence, linguistics, natural language processing, social psychology, education, anthropology, political science, human–computer interaction, and cognitive science.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers exploring all aspects of Wikimedia websites such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons. With members of the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team on the organizing committee and with the experience of successful workshops in 2015 and 2016, we aim to continue facilitating a direct pathway for exchanging ideas between the organization that operates Wikimedia websites and the researchers interested in studying them.