The WMF Researcher right was created by the
Wikimedia Foundation Legal and Community Advocacy team
to provide a temporary global right to some
NDA'd
staff and contractors assisting in specific legal research who do not require the full global Staff Rights package.
Under the principle of least access and because the need has come up multiple times the group has been converted into a more permanent global group that can be given to WMF Staff or Contractors (permanent or temporary) when they need read-only access to deleted or suppressed text and logs but do not necessarily need other rights in the full Staff package. It is also used for NDA'd 3rd party
Researchers
who need
API
access to deleted content as part of their approved research.