WSDM Workflow

Plan a WSDM campaign around the venue's defining rhythm: one deadline a year, in August, for a conference the following February - with no rebuttal stage between them. Missing August costs twelve months, and nothing after August can improve the outcome. Every date below is a 2026-cycle anchor (abstract 2025-08-07, paper 2025-08-14, notification 2025-10-23, conference 2026-02-22 to 26, Boise); the 2027 edition (20th, Hong Kong, February 15-19, 2027) had not published verified deadlines at this pack's check date - confirm them at wsdm-conference.org/2027 before committing the plan.

The annual clock

        T-26w  fit decision (wsdm-topic-selection) + evidence plan
        T-20w  datasets locked, split manifests written, baselines running
        T-12w  main results stable; ablation matrix complete
        T-8w   full draft; adversarial read #1 -> objection inventory
        T-4w   artifact repo review-ready; ethics section drafted
        T-1w   abstract registered (bidding-quality title+abstract)
  Aug   T=0    paper deadline, AoE     <- everything ends here
  Oct   ~T+10w notification            <- no interaction in between
  Nov+         camera-ready + ACM production (dates from acceptance email)
  Feb          single-track conference (talk/poster, registration, travel)

The unusual constraints, made explicit:

• Front-load quality. Venues with rebuttals let you defend a rushed evaluation; WSDM does not. The T-8w adversarial read is the highest-leverage meeting of the campaign - schedule it like a deadline.
• The August-to-October silence is planning time, not waiting time: prepare the camera-ready artifact conversion and, in parallel, the rejection fork (below), so either outcome executes immediately.
• February logistics are real work: winter travel, visas for the host country (Hong Kong in 2027), industry disclosure approvals for the final version - start each at notification, not in January.

The September pressure valve

Since 2026 the series runs a short-paper track with deadlines about a month after the long-paper deadline (2026 anchor: announced September 11/18, with registry evidence of an extension to September 18/25 - verify the current year's dates directly). Plan uses:

• A long paper that is honestly two results and a wish can be split in July: the strong, focused result targets the short track; the broader project waits a year and arrives with more evidence.
• A near-miss at the long deadline (evaluation incomplete) degrades gracefully to the short track instead of slipping twelve months.
• Do not treat "short" as "unfinished": the 2026 call asked for solid, empirically validated contributions, capped submissions at 10 per author, and desk-rejected placeholder abstracts.

Alternate entrances to the same room

A lab shipping a system can rationally take two entrances in one year (e.g., short paper + demo) - check the current calls' dual-submission language first.

Coordinating with the sibling calendar

WSDM's August deadline sits inside a lattice of neighbors (all timings approximate and cycle-volatile - verify each): SIGIR around January/February, TheWebConf around October, CIKM around May, RecSys in spring, KDD's two cycles around August and February. Two standard plays:

• Forward chain: a paper rejected from SIGIR (decisions in spring) has a natural summer revision window before WSDM's August deadline - the reviews arrive in time to act on them.
• Backward chain: a WSDM rejection in October reaches SIGIR or KDD Cycle 2 in winter with fixes applied. Map the chain before submitting, so the October decision triggers execution instead of deliberation.

Never dual-submit along the chain: these are archival venues with standard concurrent-submission prohibitions; the chain is sequential by definition.

Contingencies

• Deadline extension announced: treat extra days as validation time, not new-experiment time; late-added results are the least-reviewed and most-attacked parts of a paper at a no-rebuttal venue.
• A competing preprint appears in July: do not race it with rushed experiments. Add the contrast citation, sharpen the delta sentence, and let the August version be correct rather than first-and-fragile.
• Key experiment breaks at T-2w: invoke the valve - descope the claim to what stands, or pivot to the short track - rather than shipping a table you cannot defend to reviewers you cannot answer.
• Chair announcement contradicts the CFP: newest official instruction wins; log both with dates (precedence order in ../../resources/external_tools.md).

Team operating rules

1. One owner for the EasyChair record: account, abstract text, author order, conflicts, final PDF upload.
2. The objection inventory (started at T-8w) is a living document with named owners per objection; unresolved rows at T-1w force claim reductions.
3. The artifact repo freezes at T-1w except README fixes - late code churn breaks the numbers-match-paper invariant more often than it helps.
4. Log every date-fact with its source URL the day you verify it; August deadline drift (extensions happen) is checked weekly in the final month against the official site, not social media.

Output format

[Cycle] target edition + verified deadlines (source + check date)
[Milestones] T-26w..T-0 with owners; current slack per milestone
[Valve decision] long / long+short split / short / defer, with reason
[Alternate entrances] pursued this year: <list or none>
[Chain map] pre-WSDM source venue / post-WSDM destination, with dates
[Logistics] visa / registration / disclosure lead items and start dates