Content Partnerships Hub/Software/Tool prioritization survey end 2022

Content Partnerships Hub

Improving the Wikimedia movement’s work with content partners

Tool prioritization survey end 2022

This survey has been closed. Many thanks to everyone who provided input, helped with translations, and helped to spread the word.

Survey report

From December 6, 2022 until January 16, 2023, Wikimedia Sverige held a survey to help prioritize the most popular software tools used for content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement. The survey was advertised three times during this timeframe, using the international This Month in GLAM newsletter, various GLAMwiki- and libraries-related mailing lists, and various international Telegram and Facebook groups. It was also brought under the attention of key individuals from regions from which we wanted to especially encourage engagement (LATAM region, South Asia, Africa).

The survey collected 77 responses: 74 in English, 3 in Portuguese. This report summarizes the findings.

All questions in the survey were optional. All 77 respondents filled in the survey until the very end, but some have skipped a few questions and answer options.

Profile of the respondents

In the first section, the survey asked questions about the respondents’ background and role.

Role in the Wikimedia movement

68.8% of all respondents indicated that they are active as Wikimedia volunteers. The next most popular option (42.9%) was ‘working with a cultural organization or other type of external organization’, followed closely by Wikimedia affiliate staff and volunteers (41.6%). (Respondents could indicate multiple roles.) For legibility of the above chart, the options were the following:

I am a Wikimedia volunteer (I edit one or more Wikimedia project(s) in my free time)
I am an employee or active volunteer (e.g. board member, volunteer) of a Wikimedia affiliate
I work as a Wikimedian in Residence
I work with a cultural organization (GLAM) or another type of external organization that partners with Wikimedians
I am a volunteer developer
I am paid staff of another Wikimedia organization
I prefer not to say

Region

This survey asked in which (single) region of the world the respondent currently works on Wikimedia projects. As options, the survey re-used the regional areas that are used in the context of Wikimedia grants. 33.8% of respondents are located in Northern and Western Europe, 16.9% in the United States and Canada, 15.6% in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia. We actively reached out to key Telegram groups and individual Wikimedians in all other regions as well.

Language

67.5% of respondents mainly contribute to Wikimedia projects in English. The next most popular languages are Spanish (11.7%) and German (10.4%).

Gender identity

57.9% of all survey respondents identify as male; 36.8% as female, 1.3% as non-binary and 2.6% as genderqueer.

Use of Wikimedia projects in the past two years, and projected use in the future

Wikimedia projects – past two years

Respondents were asked: on which Wikimedia projects have you worked in the past (last two years) when doing content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement?

Wikipedia is extremely popular, but Wikidata is a close second, and even gets the most ‘often / most often’ votes.
Wikimedia Commons with structured data sees a bit more adoption than Wikisource but is still less popular than Wikimedia Commons without structured data.
Wikibase is the least used of all provided options, but many respondents want to learn more about it.

The total numbers of responses in table form:

Project	1 – Never	2 – Once or twice	3 – Sometimes	4 – Often	5 – Most often	Not interested	Not yet, but want to learn more
Wikipedia	3	8	16	18	29	0	2
Commons (without SDC)	3	4	19	21	21	0	2
Commons (with SDC)	6	8	20	15	13	0	4
Wikidata	3	4	17	21	27	0	3
Wikisource	26	21	5	3	4	1	5
Wikibase	35	3	5	1	3	2	13
Other	24	2	2	5	4	1	0

Breakdown per region According to this survey’s responses, Wikisource has been the most popular in the ESEAP region (4), Northern and Western Europe (2) and South Asia (2), when looking at answers with a score 4 (Often) or 5 (Most often).

The following table provides a general breakdown per Wikimedia project; the number in each cell shows the sum of ‘often’ and ‘most often’ responses.

	CEE and Central Asia	ESEAP	LATAM and Caribbean	Middle East and Africa	N and W Europe	South Asia	US and Canada
(Total survey respondents from this region)	12	11	7	5	26	3	13
Wikipedia	9	7	5	5	17	1	6
Commons (without SDC)	6	7	5	3	14	2	4
Commons (with SDC)	1	8	4	1	11	1	2
Wikidata	4	8	5	2	19	2	8
Wikisource	0	4	0	0	2	2	0
Wikibase	0	0	0	0	4	0	0
Other	0	1	1	2	3	1	1

In percentages of total respondents per region, it looks like this:

In the last two years, people working for cultural institutions have been most interested in Wikipedia (14 votes for ‘Most often’, 7 for ‘Sometimes’) and Wikidata (13 votes for ‘Most often’, 9 for ‘Often’). Interestingly, Wikimedia Commons seems a bit less widely used among them: without structured data, 12 cultural institution workers indicate ‘Sometimes’, and 8 ‘Most often’. Wikimedia Commons with structured data was used Sometimes (8) or Often (7).

Under ‘other’ projects, the following answers were popular:

Wikiversity (4 respondents)
Wikiquote (3 respondents)
Wikivoyage (3 respondents)
Wikibooks (2 respondents)

Wikimedia projects – next five years

As a comparison with a previous question, we also asked respondents how they think the popularity of various Wikimedia projects will evolve in the next five years (with a focus on content partnerships).

Wikidata gets a lot of attention here; this Wikimedia project gets by far the highest number of votes (28) for ‘Will become extremely important’.
Wikimedia Commons with structured data is also seen as an area of growth, with 40 respondents saying it will become ‘more important’ and 14 saying ‘extremely important’.
For Wikipedia, a very large number of respondents (50 of the 77) say this project will remain as important as today in the next five years.

The following groups of respondents expect that Wikisource will become more, or extremely important:

Respondents from the ESEAP region (7), LATAM and the Caribbean (5), Middle East and Africa (4)
Wikimedia volunteers (17) and employees/volunteers of Wikimedia affiliates (14), followed by both Wikimedians in Residence (5) and cultural institution workers (5).

People working for cultural institutions predict the strongest future importance for Wikimedia Commons with structured data (23 for ‘More important’, 5 for ‘Extremely important’), followed by Wikidata (15 for ‘More important’, 10 for ‘Extremely important’).

Under ‘other’ projects, the following were mentioned most often:

Wikivoyage (4)
Wikiversity (2)
Wiktionary (2)
Wikibooks (2)

The responses in table form:

Project	Unimportant	Less	Equal	More	Extremely important
Wikipedia	2	7	50	9	6
Commons (without SDC)	3	15	28	15	8
Commons (with SDC)	2	0	16	40	14
Wikidata	0	4	18	26	28
Wikisource	4	8	30	18	5
Wikibase	4	9	23	14	9
Other	4	4	13	3	4

Tools for content partnerships

Adoption of specific tools

We asked respondents to rate the importance of a series of tools, indicating one option per tool:

Respondent uses the tool:
- I use it and it’s an essential tool for my/our work
- I use it but it’s not an essential tool for my/our work
Respondent doesn’t use the tool but wants to learn more:
- I have heard about it and would like to learn more about it
- I have never heard of it but I am interested in learning more about it
Respondent is not interested in the tool:
- I know this tool, but don’t want to use it
- I have never heard of it and am not interested in learning more about it

A chart and table of the outcomes:

Category	Tool	Know but don’t want to use	Use, but not essential	Use, essential	Never heard; not interested	Never heard; interested	Heard; want to learn about
Evaluate and report	BaGLAMa2	8	12	21	8	16	4
Evaluate and report	Cassandra (WMCH)	6	3	2	10	26	20
Corrections	EditGroups Wikidata	4	7	4	6	38	9
Corrections	EditGroups Wikimedia Commons	5	4	2	7	39	10
Evaluate and report	GLAMorgan	10	11	15	8	21	3
Evaluate and report	GLAMorous	10	12	15	7	18	5
Evaluate and report	GLAMorous2	7	12	19	5	21	4
Upload	GLAMpipe	9	3	0	6	36	10
Evaluate and report	GLAMwiki Dashboard (WMIL)	8	6	8	5	25	16
Enrichment	ISA Tool	10	7	9	7	23	9
Re-use	Makumbusho: Apps4Museums	4	1	1	10	41	5
Evaluate and report	Massviews Analysis	4	6	16	7	27	6
Reconcile	Mix'n'match	4	24	18	3	14	9
Upload	OpenRefine	3	11	32	4	8	16
Evaluate and report	Pageviews Analysis	1	10	35	4	15	4
Upload	Pattypan	6	14	23	5	13	10
Infrastructure	PAWS	6	8	7	6	28	13
Upload	Pywikibot	6	6	11	6	25	16
Upload	QuickStatements	4	8	37	6	8	9
Upload	URL2commons	4	12	11	6	27	7
Upload	Vicuna uploader	13	6	5	6	28	10
Enrichment	Wikidata Art Depiction Explorer	7	4	4	9	32	10
Reconcile	Wikidata reconciliation service	5	1	18	6	25	13
Infrastructure	Wikidata Toolkit	5	4	4	3	32	18
Reconcile	Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service	7	4	6	5	34	11
Prepare data	Wikipedia and Wikidata Tools for Google Spreadsheets	7	8	8	3	29	12

Statistics tools (‘Evaluate and report’ category) are generally seen as extremely important. Pageviews Analysis is probably the most ‘barebones’ and flexible dashboard among all options, and receives by far the most votes. Interest in the many different, more specific and content partnerships-focused statistics tools is spread, and the tools generally also receive a significant number of ‘not interested’ or ‘don’t want to use’ votes. The top 5 of most frequently used options (sum of ‘use, but not essential’ and ‘use, essential’):

45 (58%): Pageviews Analysis
33: BaGLAMa2
31: GLAMorous2
27: GLAMorous
26: GLAMorgan

In the in depth comments, several respondents express that the existing statistics tools lack clarity around the exact data they represent, are sometimes inconsistent, or don’t measure the kind of data the respondent is interested in.

In the (smaller) category of batch contribution tools, the top 5 is the following (sum of ‘use, but not essential’ and ‘use, essential’):

45 (58%): QuickStatements
43: OpenRefine
37: Pattypan
23: URL2commons
17: Pywikibot

People from the ESEAP, LATAM, Caribbean, Middle East, Africa and South Asia regions (26 respondents) find the following tools most useful for their work (highest numbers of answers to ‘It’s an essential tool for my work’):

15 (58%): QuickStatements
14: Pageviews Analysis
12: Pattypan
9: OpenRefine
8: Massviews Analysis
7: ISA Tool, Mix’n’match
6: GLAMorous, GLAMorous2, URL2commons, Wikidata reconciliation service
5: BaGLAMa2, GLAMorgan, GLAMwiki Dashboard (WMIL), Wikipedia and Wikidata Tools for Google Spreadsheets
4: Vicuna Uploader, Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service

People from CEE, Central Asia, Northern and Western Europe, and the US and Canada (51 respondents) prioritize according to the same criteria:

23: OpenRefine
22: QuickStatements
21: Pageviews Analysis
16: BaGLAMa2
13: GLAMorous2
12: Wikidata reconciliation service
11: Pattypan, Mix’n’match
10: GLAMorgan
9: Pywikibot
8: Massviews Analysis
5: URL2commons, GLAMorous

People who work at cultural institutions and partner institutions (33 respondents) prioritize according to the same criteria:

16 (48%): QuickStatements, OpenRefine
14: Pageviews Analysis
11: BaGLAMa2, Wikidata reconciliation service
9: GLAMorous2, Mix’n’match
8: Pattypan
7: GLAMorgan
5: Massviews Analysis

Wikimedia volunteers (53 respondents) find the following tools most useful according to the same criteria:

28 (53%): QuickStatements
24: Pageviews Analysis, OpenRefine
17: Mix’n’match, Pattypan
14: BaGLAMa2, Wikidata reconciliation service
13: GLAMorous2
12: GLAMorous
10: Massviews Analysis
9: GLAMorgan, URL2commons

Tools not mentioned in the options above

Respondents also mentioned the following tools, which were not provided as options to be rated in the earlier question:

3: Outreach Dashboard, PetScan, Wikidata Query Service, ListeriaBot
2: Flickr2commons, CropTool, InternetArchive Bot, Fountain, Video2commons, Monumental, WikiShootMe, Lua modules and templates
And the following tools were each mentioned once by a respondent:
- “1 picture 1 article” tool
- Author Disambiguator
- BookReader
- http://www.budowniczy.net/
- Cat-a-lot
- Cradle
- Cronos
- data.wikilovesmonuments.it
- Depictor
- Edit In Sequence
- Entitree
- IA-Upload
- Image Annotator
- Inventaire
- InternetArchive browser plugin
- Not in the other language
- Ordia
- OTRS Release Generator
- Reasonator
- R packages for Wikidata
- Scholia
- SDC
- SQID
- stats.wikimedia.org
- TABernacle
- Video2commons
- WDFIST
- Weapon of Mass Description
- Wikidata / Wikimedia API
- Wikidata Graph builder
- Wikimedia OCR
- wikiscan.org
- WPM Translation Dashboard

Note: many of the abovementioned tools were listed in the longlist collected by the Content Partnerships Hub, except for those tools that are managed by formal organizations such as Wikimedia Deutschland (e.g. the Wikidata Query Service).

When asked why respondents don’t want to use a certain tool, the most popular answers were variants of:

7: there are better alternatives available
5: tool is not relevant enough for my workflow
4: high learning curve; too many tools to choose from
3: too complex
2: lack of documentation; not user friendly; unreliability

Languages other than English for tools

37.3% of respondents can work well with tools that are available in English; the other respondents indicate a need for other languages to some degree, with 20% of respondents most strongly indicating that they and their partners don’t speak English.

Answers could be given on a linear scale from 1-5, where the minimum and maximum options were:

1 = Not important at all – I and my content partners master English very well

5 = Extremely important – I and my content partners don't speak English

Missing functionalities

The respondents finally were asked to mention functionalities that they currently miss in Wikimedia tools for content partnerships. The answers were extremely diverse and touched various Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons). The following topics were shared by two or more respondents:

5 respondents want some form of better statistics: better reports for partners; other types of data (e.g. re-use outside of Wikipedia), and more correct and reliable statistics in general.
3 respondents express the wish for tools to create interactive maps and other types of interactive visualizations.
3 respondents want to see upload to Wikimedia Commons become easier or clearer to use in some way, but each request is very different (easy upload by newcomers, easy transfer of GLAM files to Commons, mobile upload via iOS)
2 respondents would like to see an easy to use web scraping tool.

Following up

After this survey, we will continue conversations about this topic. For this purpose, we provided the option to provide contact information.

54 of the 77 respondents entered an email address or a user page, or both. We are very happy that so many people want to be engaged!

Type of input that the respondents want to provide

Default options for providing further input in this process were:

Prioritization of key tools for content partnerships (choosing the most crucial tools which need support in the future) (44 respondents want to provide input)
Making decisions which features need to be supported and added to key tools (32 respondents want to provide input)
Funding models / financing for paid development of key tools (17 respondents want to provide input)

Conclusions, and what’s next?

With 77 diverse respondents, this survey points to some basic insights and patterns in the content partnerships work in the Wikimedia movement, specifically around technical tooling preferences in this area. The major patterns are not surprising:

Wikipedia is a very important platform for content partnerships, structured data (Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons with SDC) also carries significant weight. But there are significant regional differences: especially in the South Asia region, Wikisource is an important content partnerships platform. For regions with only few respondents in this survey, more in depth checks of these patterns may be needed.
For the next five years, respondents generally indicate that all Wikimedia projects will remain important, although a significant minority of respondents thinks that especially Wikimedia Commons without SDC will become less important.
Two broad categories of tools are especially crucial to content partnerships work: statistics tools, and batch contribution tools.
- In the category of statistics tools, popularity of tools varies. The very flexible Pageviews Analysis is by far the most popular; various more specific dashboard tools receive similar appreciation and seem at a similar level with each other in popularity.
- In the category of batch contribution and upload tools, two tools focused on structured data and Wikidata contribution rank most highly: QuickStatements and OpenRefine. Pattypan follows (with a small distance) as the third preferred tool, receiving relatively more appreciation from Wikimedians (and a bit less from cultural institution workers).

Do you agree with these conclusions, do you find that the results of this survey are as expected, or are there surprises? Did the survey (or the conclusion) miss important angles and perspectives? We welcome your comments and feedback on the talk page.

The results of this survey can help to prioritize future work on those content partnerships tools that the Wikimedia community finds most important. As the Content Partnerships Hub initiated by Wikimedia Sverige is interested in working on this area, we plan to organize follow-up conversations for this prioritization exercise. We will follow up with survey respondents who indicated that they are interested in contributing to this decision making process. If you haven’t entered your contact details via this survey but you would like to contribute as well, please contact Sandra Fauconnier at sandra.fauconnier@wikimedia.se.

Survey questions

Wikimedia Sverige is experimenting with the development of a Thematic hub for content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement. One area of experimentation is: how can we support software development of strategically important tools used in content partnerships?

With this survey, we want to start prioritizing the most important tools in this area. We are asking people who work on content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement (collaboration around content on Wikimedia projects, with external partners, such as GLAMs and other organizations): which are the most important tools for your work? Both Wikimedians and staff of external partners are invited to fill in this survey.

This is only the beginning of a longer process; this survey will be followed by many more conversations. You can provide your contact information at the end of this survey if you are interested in providing input in the future as well.

All questions in this survey are entirely optional. If you prefer to not use Google Forms, you can also copy the questions at meta.wikimedia.org and email your answers to sandra.fauconnierwikimediase.

If you have any comments or questions, please reach out to Sandra Fauconnier, Product Strategist at Wikimedia Sweden: sandra.fauconnierwikimediase

About you

First, we would like to learn a bit more about you.

How would you most accurately describe yourself? You can select more than one option.

I am a Wikimedia volunteer (I edit one or more Wikimedia project(s) in my free time)
I am an employee or active volunteer (e.g. board member, volunteer) of a Wikimedia affiliate
I work as a Wikimedian in Residence
I work with a cultural organization (GLAM) or another type of external organization that partners with Wikimedians
I am a volunteer developer
I am paid staff of another Wikimedia organization
I prefer not to say
Other:

In which region of the world do you currently mainly work on Wikimedia projects?

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia

East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP)
Latin America (LATAM) and The Caribbean
Middle East and Africa
Northern and Western Europe
South Asia
United States and Canada

In which language(s) do you mainly contribute to Wikimedia projects?

English
Español
Deutsch
⽇本語
Français
Pусский
Italiano
汉语
Português
Polski
Nederlands
عربى
فارسی
한국어
Bahasa Indonesia
Svenska
українська
Čeština
עברית
Tiếng Việt
I prefer not to say
Other:

Which of these categories describe your gender identity?

Select all that apply

Man
Woman
Transgender
Non-binary
Genderqueer
I prefer not to say
Other:

What is your age?

<15
15–24
25–34
35–44
45–54
55–64
>64
I prefer not to say

Your work on Wikimedia projects

On which Wikimedia projects have you worked in the last two years when you did content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement?

	1 – Never	2 – Once or twice	3 – Sometimes	4 – Often	5 – Most often	I am not interested in this project	I haven’t worked on this project yet, but I want to learn more about it
Wikipedia
Wikimedia Commons – without structured data
Wikimedia Commons – with structured data
Wikidata
Wikisource
Wikibase (e.g. supporting partners to set up their own database)
Other (please state below)

On which other Wikimedia project(s) have you done content partnerships in the last two years, and how often?

...

If you look at the upcoming five years, how do you think your work in content partnerships on each of these projects will evolve?


	Will become unimportant	Will become less important	Will stay as important as today	Will become more important	Will become extremely important
Wikipedia
Wikimedia Commons – without structured data
Wikimedia Commons – with structured data
Wikidata
Wikisource
Wikibase (e.g. supporting partners to set up their own database)
Other (please state below)

On which other Wikimedia project(s) do you expect you will do content partnerships in the next five years (2023 to 2027)? How important will these be (or become)?

...

Content partnerships tools that are important to you

Which of the following software/tools do you use for Wikimedia content partnerships, and to what extent?


	I know this tool, but don’t want to use it	I use it but it’s not an essential tool for my/our work	I use it and it’s an essential tool for my/our work	I have never heard of it and am not interested in learning more about it	I have never heard of it but I am interested in learning more about it	I have heard about it and would like to learn more about it
BaGLAMa2
Cassandra (WMCH)
EditGroups Wikidata
EditGroups Wikimedia Commons
GLAMorgan
GLAMorous
GLAMorous2
GLAMpipe
GLAMwiki Dashboard (WMIL)
ISA Tool
Makumbusho: Apps4Museums
Massviews Analysis
Mix'n'match
OpenRefine
Pageviews Analysis
Pattypan
PAWS
Pywikibot
QuickStatements
URL2commons
Vicuna uploader
Wikidata Art Depiction Explorer
Wikidata reconciliation service
Wikidata Toolkit
Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service
Wikipedia and Wikidata Tools for Google Spreadsheets

Do you miss any tools in the overview above? Which one(s) do you miss?

(Please note that we are talking about tools for content partnerships, i.e. collaborations with GLAMs and other external partners).

...

If you indicate ‘I don’t want to use’ for any of the above tools: what is/are the reason(s) why you won’t use this/those tool(s)?

...

How important is it for your work to have tools available in your native language, and languages other than English?

1 = Not important at all – I and my content partners master English very well	2	3	4	5 = Extremely important – I and my content partners don't speak English
o	o	o	o	o

In which areas do you miss tools or functionalities for content partnerships? What kind of work would you like to do with partners which is not (sufficiently) supported by Wikimedia tools?

...

Keeping in touch

Your contact information (optional)

After this survey, we will continue conversations about this topic. If you want to be involved in these follow-up conversations, please leave your email address or other contact information below (e.g. a user page):

…

Please indicate which aspects you would like to talk about further.

If you indicate interest in this area, WMSE will follow up with you on these topics.

You can select one or more options.

Prioritization of key tools for content partnerships (choosing the most crucial tools which need support in the future)
Making decisions which features need to be supported and added to key tools
Funding models / financing for paid development of key tools
Other: …

Other people or groups to contact

Which other people (individual Wikimedians, groups…) should WMSE also consult on this topic? You can suggest names below. Also feel free to forward this survey directly to anyone who may be interested.

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Anything else you want to share?

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