User:DarTar


 * This is my volunteer account, for my staff account see User:Dario (WMF)

Hello, I'm ! I am an Italian transplant in San Francisco.

My Wikipedia contributions
I have been editing Wikipedia for about 19 years and most recently I've become an avid Wikidata contributor. As an open knowledge and open science advocate, as well as a TeX groupie, you may find me edit articles on topics related to open access and digital typography. However, some of my proudest contributions to English Wikipedia are about bloody chapters in London history (Smithfield, London ), hypothetical astronomy (Planet Nine ), and natural and technical disasters (2014 South Napa earthquake, August 2016 Central Italy earthquake‬, October 2016 Dyn cyberattack). Since 2019, I'm mainly focused on biographies of scientists, naturalists, and science communicators (Corina Newsome, Earyn McGee, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, J. Drew Lanham, Jason Ward, Naia Butler-Craig, Darryl Fears, Black Birders Week) as well as Wikipedia's and Wikidata's coverage of biodiversity. I create or expand articles for species that lack a Wikidata or Wikipedia entry (for example, all known species of leaf-footed bugs in genus Anisoscelis or the different subspecies of Red-tailed Hawk -- Buteo jamaicensis) and I am involved in initiatives such as WikiProject Biodiversity to promote sharing and reuse of open-licensed images of nature.

I am a compulsive new article creator, a WikiGnome, and an unabashed inclusionist. I also care a lot about citations and verifiability. Random love signals are filed here.

My work at Wikimedia
I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation between 2011 and 2019. Between 2015 and 2019 I served as the Foundation's Director of Research, overseeing the organization's research strategy and driving research collaboration and outreach efforts with industry, academia, and the Wikimedia movement. Prior to this role, I was the lead of the Research and Data team, a role I took on after joining WMF as an individual contributor in 2011. I helped coordinate Wikimedia's early research outreach and policy making experiments via the Research Committee and I co-authored the Wikimedia Foundation's Open Access policy, which secures the openness and reusability of all the output of WMF's research collaborations. A lot of my energy these past years went into the creation of a community building an open repository of source metadata to serve free knowledge. Prior to joining the Wikimedia Foundation, I held research and teaching positions at Sciences Po, the University of Surrey and University College London. I hold an MSc and PhD in cognitive science from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), an MA in philosophy of science from the University of Pisa and a licenza from the Scuola Normale Superiore. A list of talks and publications is available on my personal homepage.