Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change
| Visualizing sustainability and climate change on Wikipedia | Project | Activities | DMP | Documentation | Credits |
This page documents a research project in progress.
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Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change: Assessing online open content and supporting community engagement. The case of Wikipedia (2025-2028) is a research project promoted by SUPSI and supported by the SNSF.
Title: Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change: Assessing online open content and supporting community engagement. The case of Wikipedia.
Summary
[edit]In a world where the climate crisis gains traction in the media, mobilises youth, and gains the attention of international agencies, NGOs, and governments, having access to reliable, multilingual, up-to-date, quality information is crucial. Research is needed to foster the production and dissemination of proper information. Visual analytics and participatory design can support the analysis of current information and foster better knowledge creation.
Wikipedia is a mainstream source of information accessible in 300 languages, with 15 million articles and over 20 billion views per month: it is the largest existing open collaborative peer-production platform, with 300,000 contributors and 100 million registered users actively involved in producing and disseminating open knowledge. Contributing to support those active communities in evaluating and producing quality knowledge responds to a societal need and triggers research in design, boosting active citizenship and democratic processes.
This research adopts visual analytics methods to analyse the status of Wikipedia articles related to sustainability and climate change and – through a participatory approach – involves stakeholders in designing new visual models supporting the creation and editing of content in different languages, with the overall goals of increasing the quantity and quality of Wikipedia articles related to sustainability and climate change and providing online communities with a methodology and a visualisation tool which supports the creation of more objective and reliable information related to any given topic within Wikipedia.
Building upon the findings of our previous research endeavours, which have already demonstrated the efficacy of sharing visual analyses of Wikipedia data in monitoring content status and supporting community efforts, this research is strategically aligned with the needs of researchers, institutions, and volunteers. It produces new knowledge on the use of participatory design methods and visual analytics methods, to support researchers and citizen scientists in analysing, evaluating and monitoring online content and to allow online communities – institutions and volunteers – to analyse, plan, and take actions around a social matter of concern.
The research project has a transdisciplinary approach. It is led by an interdisciplinary team at SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (involving researchers with specific expertise in design and data visualisation, co-design and participatory design, communication studies, ethnography, sociology and climate change), and it is developed in collaboration with the Wikiproject Climate Change and partnership with the institutions “Wikimedistas de Uruguay” and “Wiki in Africa”, and the international campaign “Open Climate Campaign” about climate change and open data, promoted by Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL.
1. Current state of research in the field
[edit]Design is shifting its focus from individual material artefacts towards systems design (Saward, 2021). In this context, design is gaining popularity in several disciplines related to social studies because its methods are useful for structuring and amplifying creativity (Lee, 2020), particularly in studies about “digital democracy”, using digital technologies to foster democratic processes. Traditional top-down governance and managing models are recently challenged by new bottom-up approaches enabled by digital technologies and participatory methods (Helbing et al., 2022). The planning and policy-making activities are looking for conversational processes, mediated by design methods and digital technologies, in order to seek consensus or at least for the acceptance by the various involved parties, taking into account different meaning systems as well as bounded communication and cognition (Mäntysalo, 2005). The main challenge those activities are facing is the representation of different end-users' viewpoints and their implementation within digital platforms (Bour, 2019).
Visualisations of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Projects
[edit]Information design studies about visual analytics methods applied to co-created content within digital open platforms, such as Wikipedia, demonstrate that it is possible to map discussions and concerns about social (Weltevrede and Borra, 2016) and cultural (Pentzold et al., 2017) dynamics. Typically, the analysis of the information produced and the interaction among Wikipedia users make visible content issues informing researchers about an ongoing debate or social issue. Several researches based on visual analytics highlight content imbalance across linguistic versions (Ribé and Laniado, 2018), genders (Beytía et al., 202), and cultures (Zheng et al., 2022). Those content issues reflect cultural biases and issues in the access to information. Researchers who visually map content issues on Wikipedia are essentially focused on understanding the ongoing social issue. They monitor the quality of articles (Teblunthuis, 2021) by maintaining active involvement in Wikipedia communities (Langrock and González-Bailón, 2022). The final goal is to assess the status of an issue, not to undertake any action to mitigate negative phenomena. The research contribution tends to be limited to a set of guidelines aimed at supporting the communities to foster equity and diversity (Ferran-Ferrer et al., 2022). In recent years, several national and international projects have been conducted.
The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is one of Europe's leading internet studies research groups conducting research projects on social and political issues such as MACOSPOL (Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics), EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science), and Contropedia. Scholia (Wikidata:Q45340488, image on the right) produces profiles based on Wikidata which also provide an overview of topics with simple visualisations such as context, recently published works, publications by year, network of authors (https://scholia.toolforge.org/). Scholia does not link Wikidata with Wikipedia articles and it doesn’t provide information related to the quality of Wikipedia articles related to that topic. “Listen to Wikipedia” is a beautiful and poetic multimedia visualizer created by Mahmoud Hashemi and Stephen LaPorte, which shows recent Wikipedia edits into visuals and sounds (http://listen.hatnote.com/). The work provides a sense of how frequently Wikipedia is edited and the size of those contributions; it doesn’t provide support for editors. The History Flow (Viégas et al., 2004) is a beautiful visualization produced in 2003 representing the editing history of Wikipedia; the tool is not meant to support contributors. Wikipedia Diversity Observatory (Wikidata:Q67153736) is a research project identifying missing topics on Wikipedia aiming at understanding and increasing diversity within content and communities. The visualisations provide an overview of the knowledge inequalities in each Wikipedia linguistic edition and allow one to browse lists of articles by topics to identify in particular the possibility of translations (Miquel-Ribé & Laniado, 2021). In Switzerland, one of the most active research groups analysing Wikipedia data for social studies is the EPFL Data Science Lab. They conduct the research project “Sequential Models for Analyzing Navigation/Reading Sessions”. The project aims to model the sequential dependencies among page views existent in the reading/navigation sessions to analyse how end users navigate Wikipedia. Wikimedia CH has a map service (Wikidata:Q117210027), a tool to explore locations, article coverage and supporting contributions. Those visualisations provide information related to the existence of Wikipedia articles in different languages but do not provide information to evaluate the quality of existing articles.
Climate Change
[edit]Sustainability and climate change are central topics in the public debate and on Wikipedia. Between 2017 and 2022, across several linguistic editions of Wikipedia, around 4000 articles about sustainability and climate change received over 517 million pageviews (Meier, 2024). The Wikimedia community has recognized the importance of the topic early on, with experiences such as the Wiki for Human Rights campaign mobilizing around the topic of the Right to a Healthy Environment; the Wikiproject Climate Change being replicated in multiple languages Wikipedias, including English, Spanish, French and more; with user groups, such as Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, beginning to organize to drive more attention on the topic. In 2022, over +70 community events had sustainability and climate change as the core topics of their activity. Research has been exploring extensively controversies related to climate change (Esteves and Cukierman, 2014; Niederer, 2019; Sanyal 2023; Benjakob et al.., 2023) and it has been using Wikipedia pageview as an efficient tool to evaluate public interest in climate change (Meier, 2024). However, it is still difficult to evaluate how well the Wikimedia communities are covering the topics across multiple linguistic editions of Wikipedia and to tell a compelling story to outside partners on why contributing to Wikipedia on these topics matters so much, and what yet remains to be done. So far, most of the campaigns manually curate lists of articles every time, going through article by article to assess quality, and often without being able to compare across different linguistic editions of Wikipedia easily.
Research gap and how this project can contribute to closing the gap
[edit]Visual analytics and participatory design methods tend to focus on two perspectives: the analysis and the action. On the one hand, visual analytics focus on tools that allow people to visually map the contradictory and controversial nature of matters of concern (Latour, 2009) and, on the other hand, participatory design methods focus on the reuse of already-known design solutions to practically discuss and solve a social issue.
The present research project combines the two different perspectives by providing a visual analysis of the social matter of concern – sustainability and climate change – and tools that support the discussion and the actions to be undertaken. The research project aims to produce new knowledge on the use of participatory design methods and visual analytics methods, to support researchers and citizen scientists in analysing, evaluating and monitoring online content and to allow online communities – institutions and volunteers – to analyse, plan, and take actions around a social matter of concern.
2. Current state of your own research
[edit]The research team is affiliated with the Institute of design at SUPSI, which develops research and applied research in the field of design with a specific focus on data visualisations, visual analytics, participatory design, co-design, cooperation with collaboratory online projects and communities (i.e. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap) and open data in the fields of arts and humanities. Furthermore, the members of the research team are active volunteers within the Wikimedia movement.
The project “Wikipedia Primary School” (FNS Grant number 148975, 2014-2017 Wikidata:Q117379085) developed and evaluated a set of methods involving Wikipedia communities and domain experts to assess Wikipedia articles for primary education and to involve a wide network of scholars and contributors in their production. Within the project, the visual analysis of the Wikipedia articles under examination helped to support the evaluation. We use network analysis and data visualisation of the articles’ features (such as references, images, notes, and clean-up tags) to map their status. During the Wikipedia Primary School project, several participatory activities were conducted. We held the Workshop Wikidata SUPSI (2017) to identify knowledge gaps in the Wikimedia projects (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Workshop_Wikidata_SUPSI). We focused on the presence of articles about women who were born in Europe and Africa. Principal investigator: Iolanda Pensa; researcher and designer: Giovanni Profeta; researcher: Marta Pucciarelli.
The project “GLAM Visual Tool” (financed by Wikimedia CH, 2017 Wikidata:Q117280411) identified a series of visualisations to evaluate the impact of WikiGLAM cooperation: the impact of the upload of open data by cultural institutions on the Wikimedia projects and in particular on Wikimedia Commons. Principal investigator: Iolanda Pensa; researcher and designer: Giovanni Profeta. This research project contributed to the creation of Wikimedia CH statistical tool “GLAM stat tool Cassandra” to monitor WikiGLAM cooperation (https://stats.wikimedia.swiss/).
The project “Map the GLAM” (developed with the PhD thesis of Giovanni Profeta, 2019-2020 Wikidata:Q117379157) is a visual analysis of the digital images uploaded by ETH-Bibliothek to Wikimedia Commons. The project aimed to define a set of visual representations to analyse the status and the spread of a digitised collection in Wikipedia and its sister projects (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Map_the_GLAM).
The communication project “Culture and Safety in Africa” (Agora Programma - FNS Grant number 158539, 2014 Wikidata:Q117287742) contributed to improving and correcting the limited information about three African countries among the Swiss public (Cameroon, Angola and South Africa), with a specific emphasis on their cultural and artistic richness. The project focused on three Swiss target groups: Wikipedia readers, individuals and institutions working in the field of art and culture, and individuals and institutions working in the field of cooperation and development. It leverages the use of open licenses through two pilot workshops. Project lead: Iolanda Pensa.
The project “Open Science for Arts, Design and Music” (swissuniversities, 2022-2024 Wikidata:Q116859240) contributes to open access, open data and citizen science in the fields of arts and design. It is led by SUPSI and it involves all Swiss schools of arts and design. It responds to the specific needs of the disciplinary fields of arts, design and music, with a focus on third-party copyright and multimedia formats and produces guidelines and training (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Science_for_Arts,_Design_and_Music). Project Lead: Iolanda Pensa.
Follow up on the preliminary project “Wikipedia and the Italian School”
The methodology developed within this proposal relies on the preliminary project “Wikipedia and the Italian School”.
The project “Wikipedia and the Italian School” (Wikipedia e la scuola italiana, founded by Wikimedia Italia, 2020 ongoing Wikidata:Q117279813) evaluated how Wikipedia provides open educational resources related to topics studied in the Italian school system from primary school to high school. The project was created to support online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and applied the insights and visual methods that arose from the Wikipedia Primary School in the Italian school context; it produced a visualisation tool that maps the status of Italian Wikipedia articles related to school programs (https://itwiki-scuola-italiana.toolforge.org/). Principal investigator: Iolanda Pensa (volunteer); researcher and designer: Giovanni Profeta.
This previous preliminary project produced the following results:
- development of a first prototype of a visualisation tool based on a limited set of data which are not connected to Wikidata and which are downloaded yearly to update the visualisation;
- test of the usability of the tool by the institution Wikimedia Italia and by the active volunteers of Wikipedia in Italian. The tool was used by the institution to present the status of Wikipedia articles related to the specific topic of the Italian syllabus, evaluate Wikipedia as an open educational tool, and trigger improvements. The tool was used by the volunteers to identify relevant articles, prioritise interventions, and facilitate the identification of specific actions to improve content;
- description of the first set of parameters for the visualisations relevant to institutions, volunteers, and research purposes (please refer to the methodology for the list of parameters already identified);
- confirmation of the interest in the tool by institutions and communities. The tool has already been used and adapted by the institutions and communities of Uruguay and Ghana.
3. Detailed research plan
[edit]Objectives
[edit]The research project aims to support democratic processes through design and data visualisation methods. With a focus on the creation and improvement of content related to sustainability and climate change, the project’s major objectives are: 1. producing an analysis and evaluation of online content; 2. supporting community engagement by allowing online communities – institutions and volunteers – to analyse, plan, and take action around a social matter of concern; 3. producing new knowledge on the use of participatory design methods and visual analytics methods.
With its methods and activities, the project addresses the following research questions with a focus on Wikipedia:
- What is the status (quality and quantity) of information and knowledge gaps related to sustainability and climate change within Wikipedia?
- Which set of data and data visualisation models can provide information related to the status of articles and knowledge gaps to prioritise the actions to be undertaken, such as decision-making, creating and improving content and strategically communicating and reporting?
Method
[edit]The research project is developed in the field of design. It is grounded on studies about data visualisation methods applied to co-created content as a way to investigate social issues, and it relies on participatory design methods supporting democratic processes. The participatory design methodology involves experts in the fields of sustainability and climate change and the Wikipedia communities.
Participatory design
[edit]The collaborative approach of participatory design is used within the project design process to assess target groups’ needs, preferences, and insights. The use of visualisation tools, designed in a way that makes it easy for non-experts to gather insights (Hyun-Chan and So-Hyun, 2007), such as interactive data visualisations, GIS mapping, three-dimensional modelling, virtual reality, and urban simulation, have the potential to enhance the way planners and people interact with each other (Al-Kodmany, 2001). To facilitate the involvement and to address different groups’ needs, the project focuses on three targets, which are simply defined as institutions, volunteers, and researchers.
- Researchers are academic scholars and citizen scientists interested in analysing and monitoring a selection of content or topics. Within this project, researchers need to have access to an overview of the specific topic of sustainability and climate change on Wikipedia and information related to visualisations, content quality, sources, contributors, edit history, and controversies. The research team is involved in all activities in collaboration with the partner Florian Meier, two other scholars, and three Wikimedia volunteers interested in research activities.
- Institutions are associations and groups active in the Wikimedia movement, initiatives interested in specific content, and content providers such as universities and GLAMs - galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. According to the results of our preliminary project, institutions need support in decision-making (to define strategies supporting volunteers and to select open data, content and references needed to improve online knowledge), in monitoring and evaluating the impact of their work and communicating the relevance of their work to stakeholders (i.e. partners, donors, data providers) efficiently. Among their expected needs, there are overviews of the status quo which can provide information about the potential strategies to improve it (i.e. quality of the most visited articles, topics which miss references, use of open data and sources in open access, availability of quality content in different languages, number of contributors per article), visualisations which can be integrated into their social balance, reports and communication channels, and visualisations of changes which provide a portrait of the situation “before and after”. Partners of the project are the institutions “Wikimedistas de Uruguay” and “Wiki in Africa”, as well as the international campaign “Open Climate Campaign” about climate change and open data, promoted by Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL.
- Volunteers are active contributors to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. They need support in identifying what is missing and how they can contribute. According to the results of our preliminary project, volunteers need their curiosity to be stimulated, their contributions to generate visible change, and the ability to easily see which activities they can do that take a limited amount of time to implement (i.e. improving the lead section, translating good articles, adding references, reducing clean-up tags); they need lists of articles which can also be used during edit campaign (i.e. edit-a-thon and Writing Weeks) and data to be used with bots. The project involves the WikiProject Climate Change on Wikipedia in English, which lists 95 participants, and the WikiProject Climate Change on Wikidata, which lists 15 participants.
The focus on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects: quality assessment and knowledge gaps
[edit]The research focuses on Wikipedia articles because they involve the largest online active communities (300,000 active editors and 100 million registered users) and they are a mainstream source of information (accessed 20 billion times per month in 332 languages). Released under open licenses and tools (CC BY-SA for Wikipedia license and CC0 for Wikidata), all Wikipedia and Wikimedia content is open to any reuse and compliant with Open Science. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are sociotechnical systems involving humans and bots (Niederer, S & van Dijck, 2010), relevant to active citizenship and citizen science, particularly in the fields of heritage (Marwick and Smith, 2021; Bertacchini & Pensa, 2023), climate knowledge (Mietchen, 2022) and medical information on Ebola and COVID-19 (Mietchen and Hussain, 2021). The criteria for defining the quality of a Wikipedia article have been extensively studied, and particularly relevant for this research are the importance of sources which guarantee the verifiability of content, the size of articles, and the number of contributors who can participate in reviewing content and internal links (Hu et al., 2007; De la Calzada & Dekhtyar, 2010; Khan et al., 2019); our research also considers the quality assessment implemented online by the Wikimedia communities and the knowledge gaps taxonomy. The Knowledge gaps taxonomy of the Wikimedia projects (image on the right) is a set of multidimensional aspects of knowledge gaps related to Wikipedia, including content, readers and contributors and identified by the research team of the Wikimedia Foundation (Redi et al., 2020).
The creation of an interactive visualisation tool targeting institutions, volunteers and researchers
[edit]This research develops an interactive visualisation tool which focuses on sustainability and climate change to respond to the existing needs of project stakeholders. It is designed to implement automatic data gathering for different sets of articles, allowing the community to analyse specific sub-topics in Wikipedia. The involvement of the stakeholders in the design of the tool allows us to bridge research with the online community.
Visual analytics methods to analyse the Wikipedia content
[edit]The current status of the selected articles, their references and the impact of the visualisation tool on Wikipedia content. Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary field that integrates techniques from data visualisation, statistics and computer science to foster the understanding of complex datasets. It uses interactive visual interfaces to help users gain insights from large and diverse datasets. The research integrates well-known visual analytics methods and promising methods that are emerging from recent research in the context of user-generated content analysis. In particular, the research combines visual interfaces with methods to analyse articles’ quality metrics (Sciascio et al., 2017 and 2019) and research dissemination (Bertone, Burghardt, 2017).
Research team and its transdisciplinary approach
[edit]The research project has a transdisciplinary approach. It is led by an interdisciplinary team at SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (involving researchers with specific expertise in design and data visualisation, co-design and participatory design, communication studies, ethnography, sociology and climate change), and it actively involves the online open communities of Wikimedia and a series of institutions, volunteers and researchers presented in the session partners and collaborations. This structure of the research team guarantees that the project reaches its objectives and responds to the specific needs of its three target groups.
Iolanda Pensa is the main applicant; she conceived the research and is responsible for it. She is a senior researcher and head of the research area “Culture and Territory” at the Institute of Design of SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, where she is also a consultant for Open Science and a board member. As a volunteer, she has been an active member of the Wikimedia and Creative Commons movements since 2006, chair of Wikimedia Italia and chair of the international Wikimania Steering Committee. She is a member of the Sounding Board Researchers for the Swiss Open Research Data policy and she is a representative of citizens in the technical guiding committee of Repubblica Digitale. Art historian, she holds a PhD in Social anthropology and ethnography at the EHESS in Paris and in Territorial government and planning at the Politecnico di Milano. Her research work focuses on contemporary African art, public art and biennials, systems of knowledge production and distribution, Wikipedia and open licenses. She conceived and directed related projects, such as Wikipedia Primary School, GLAM visual tool, Wikipedia and the Italian School, Culture and Safety in Africa, and Open Science for Arts, Design and Music.
Giovanni Profeta contributes to the project as a researcher and designer. He holds a PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano, where he developed a thesis on user interfaces to access digitised cultural collections within the DensityDesign research lab. After obtaining a master's in Visual and Multimedia Communication from the University IUAV of Venice, he collaborated on projects about web design and digital publishing in web and interaction design studios based in Italy. As a researcher at the Institute of Design of SUPSI, he is carrying out applied research projects focused on visualisation methods to access and analyse complex cultural and environmental data. He is also a teacher of Interaction Design courses for the Bachelor in Visual Communication and the Master of Arts in Interaction Design and of the Data Visualisation course for the Bachelor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He worked as a researcher and designer in the related projects Wikipedia Primary School, GLAM visual tool, Wikipedia and the Italian School, Culture and Safety in Africa and Open Science for Arts, Design and Music.
Marta Pucciarelli contributes to the project with her expertise in digital communication and collaborative online communities; she focuses on online communication patterns, information dissemination, and knowledge production processes. Her research is focused on online communication, digital representation, and accessibility of cultural heritage and urban spaces. With a PhD in communication science from the University of Lugano (2019), she has extensively examined the evolution and representation of an African digital city compared to its physical counterpart. Over the past decade, she has actively participated in research projects addressing knowledge gaps in online collaborative projects. This involvement includes engaging experts to review Wikipedia's educational content, researching the needs of public and private institutions regarding the use of open data, and encouraging institutions to share their content through open licenses. With a focus on accessibility and inclusion, her work is characterised by co-design principles and participatory methodologies for community engagement, resulting in the creation of meaningful services and experiences. She has contributed to various projects such as Mobile Access To Knowledge, Wikipedia Primary School, Integrated and Holistic Management of the Open Data Life Cycle, Open Science for Arts, Design and Music, and Accessible Heritage Inclusive Territory.
Luca Morici contributes to the project with his expertise in sociology and data analysis; he focuses on understanding the needs, preferences, and challenges faced by researchers, institutions and volunteers, thereby informing the design and implementation of effective engagement strategies and visual analytics tools. He holds a degree in Sociology from the University of Urbino and is a researcher and lecturer in Visual sociology, Infographics and Social practices for visual communication at the Institute of Design (IDe) of SUPSI. His interest in design applied to science communication has led to the recent establishment of the "Design for science" sector within the IDe, of which he is responsible. In the sociological field, he is interested in theories of social practices applied both to the analysis of behaviour and to the planning of communicative interventions aimed at raising awareness. In research projects, he is interested in adopting a transdisciplinary approach that favours methods and processes of participatory design and/or co-design by actively involving all stakeholders towards the creation of innovative solutions that promote sustainability, equal opportunities and accessibility for all the public. He is a member of the steering committee of the Competence Centre Climate Change and Territory (CCCT).
Cristian Scapozza contributes to the project with his expertise in climate change. He holds a PhD in Geography at the University of Lausanne and is a professor in applied geomorphology at (SUPSI), where he is responsible for the Competence Centre Climate Change and Territory of the Department of Environment Constructions and Design. He is vice president of the Swiss Geomorphological Society (former President 2020–2022) and a member of the Steering and Scientific Committees of the Swiss Permafrost Monitoring Network PERMOS. His main scientific interests are in the field of geomorphological evolution of Alpine valleys, with a particular focus on Quaternary geological mapping, glacial and periglacial processes, hillslope processes and dynamics, natural and historical evolution of Alpine floodplains, and geoheritage promotion. He was also Director of the historical and ethnographical Valle di Blenio Museum between 2018 and 2022. He is the author of more than 150 scientific and mediation publications, most of them dedicated to the paleoclimatic evolution of the Southern Alps, the impact of climate change on high mountain periglacial environments, hillslope processes, and fluvial, fluvial-deltaic and lacustrine environments.
Web developer develops and deploys the backend and the frontend of the visualisation tool. She/he interacts with the API of the Wikimedia projects and exposes data format which can be easily read by the frontend. She/he writes the technical documentation.
Partners
[edit]Florian Maximilian Meier contributes to the project with his expertise in climate change, the Wikimedia projects and data analysis. He is an associate professor of quantitative user experience and information behaviour at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a doctorate from Regensburg University in Germany. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, digital humanities, and interactive information retrieval and behaviour, with a thematic focus on climate change communication. He is also the author of the study Using Wikipedia Pageview Data to Investigate Public Interest in Climate Change at a Global Scale (Meier, 2024),
Wikimedistas de Uruguay (program lead Evelin Heidel) is a Wikimedia user group, and it has been working on sustainability and climate change in the Spanish-speaking context, helping set up the Wikiproyecto Cambio climático, and assisting with the organisation of the Wii 4 Human Rights Campaign in the LATAM context. https://wikimedistas.uy/. The partnership with Wikimedistas de Uruguay is important to engage active Wikipedians from Latin America in contributing to the design of the interactive visualisation tool and properly considering the communication of initiatives to their stakeholders. Wikimedistas de Uruguay specifically contributes to the research by involving Latin American initiatives and by assessing the tool with its stakeholders.
Wiki in Africa (chair and advancement lead Isla Haddow-Flood) is a non-profit organisation based in South Africa that operates globally. It aims at empowering and engaging citizens of Africa and its diaspora to collect, develop and contribute educational and relevant content that relates to the theme of Africa under a free licence, and to engage in global knowledge systems by encouraging access to, awareness of, and support for open knowledge, the open movement and the Wikimedia projects. It has developed the photographic campaign Climate and Weather within Wiki Loves Africa and the project Africa Environment WikiFocus (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Africa_Environment), which encourages Wikimedia and other communities to contribute content-related to Africa’s Climate to the Wikimedia projects; it is developed in cooperation with Wikimedia Community User Group Côte d’Ivoire (WMUG IC) as an integral part of the African Knowledge Initiative (AKI) series of campaigns. The partnership with Wiki in Africa is important to engage active Wikipedians from Africa in contributing to the design of the interactive visualisation tool and properly considering the communication of initiatives to their stakeholders. Wiki in Africa specifically contributes to the research by involving African initiatives and assessing the tool with its stakeholders.
Open Climate Campaign (assistant director Monica Granados) is promoted by Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) with the support of Open Society Foundations and Arcadia. Its goal is to see all climate change and biodiversity research available as immediate open access to ensure increased equitable collaboration in finding faster solutions to the climate crisis. It facilitates cooperation and coordination at the intersection of the open access and climate change movements and it focuses on open and transparent research and data, and removing policy and legal barriers to the accessibility of climate change research https://openclimatecampaign.org/.
3.1 Work packages
[edit]WP1: Definition of the dataset of articles to be investigated
[edit]- Definition of a list of articles from the WikiProject Climate Change, a collaboration area for volunteers interested in improving coverage of climate change on Wikipedia in English. In March 2024 the list by WikiProject Climate Change is composed of 4350 articles. The system to identify articles is the same one used to study (Meier, 2024) the around 517 Million Wikipedia pageviews of 3965 items from WikiProject Climate Change across 213 countries within the years 2017 to 2022 (G. Profeta, I. Pensa, M. Pucciarelli).
- Each article selected by the WikiProject Climate Change and its Wikidata identifier is retrieved; the dataset is obtained through Wikidata SPARQL queries and it provides structured data (G. Profeta, web developer).
- Identification of relevant clusters of articles, according to Wikipedia categories and Wikidata proprieties (G. Profeta, I. Pensa, M. Pucciarelli, L. Morici, C. Scapozza).
- Identification of the coverage of the selected articles on Wikipedia in Spanish, French and Italian (G. Profeta, web developer).
WP2: Definition of user requirements targeting institutions, volunteers and researchers
[edit]The definition of user requirements is based on the selected list of articles and clusters (WP1) and the preliminary project “Wikipedia and the Italian School”. It presents the existing tool, its parameters and potentialities applied to the topic of sustainability and climate change https://itwiki-scuola-italiana.toolforge.org/. The three target groups involved in the projects are engaged in presenting their needs and defining the desiderata of the tool with different methods.
- Conduction of five semi-structured qualitative interviews with researchers in the fields of sustainability and climate change and volunteers interested in research related to Wikipedia articles. The interviews explore the list of articles, suggest sources to extend the list of articles and explore how Wikipedia data can inform the development and dissemination of scientific research on the selected topic ((M. Pucciarelli, L. Morici, I. Pensa, G. Profeta, C. Scapozza and partners).
- Conduction of an online focus group of 1 hour and a half with six representatives of the institutions “Wiki in Africa”, “Wikimedistas de Uruguay”, and the international project “Open Climate Campaign”. It provides qualitative data on the institutions’ activities related to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects (including current institutional procedures and pain points) and the requirements for communication activities (i.e. fundraising, reporting and impact measuring, collaboration and dissemination). (M. Pucciarelli, L. Morici, I. Pensa, G. Profeta and partners).
- Discussions with the online communities of Wikipedia take place through Wikipedia talk pages related to sustainability and climate change and 2 online meetings. The WikiProject Climate Change on Wikipedia in English lists 95 participants; the WikiProject Climate Change on Wikidata lists 15 participants. Using talk pages and online meetings is the Wikimedia consolidated practice to present and discuss initiatives. The online exchanges aim to produce a list of needs related to performing online actions on Wikipedia articles (i.e. improving articles, managing controversies, fixing issues, visualising changes) and desiderata in terms of visual analysis. The user requirements are described in a report shared with the communities on Media-wiki (M. Pucciarelli, I. Pensa, G. Profeta).
WP3: Implementation of the visualisation tool
[edit]- A participatory design workshop involving the entire research team (including all researchers, the institutions “Wiki in Africa”, “Wikimedistas de Uruguay”, “Open Climate Campaign” and the Wikipedia communities) allows collaboration online in a plenary session and 3 working groups, to identify design solutions fulfilling the user requirements. The workshop lasts around 2 hours and uses online boards to brainstorm and sketch visual interfaces and solutions. Each group focuses on the specific requirements (WP2) of researchers, institutions, and volunteers. During the preparation of the workshop, the materials obtained from the WP1 are integrated into a set of online documents to support workshop activities. The workshop produced a report (M. Pucciarelli, G. Profeta, L. Morici, C. Scapozza and partners).
- The visualisation tool is implemented through the use of open web technologies and consists of API integration and the data visualisation system. The source code of the tool is hosted in a public repository, and the live version of the tool is hosted by Toolforge. The implementation of the visualisation tool consists of three phases:
- Preliminary release to test if the design of data visualisations fulfils user requirements and to check technical feasibility. In the preliminary release, an API integration is built to retrieve data and information from Wikidata and the set of Wikipedia articles related to sustainability and climate change, including page views, article chronology and the discussions contained within the talk page. The data visualisation system is built by taking into account the desiderata of the three types of stakeholders and consists of multiple static views of the data about Wikipedia articles (G. Profeta, web developer).
- Second release to fully implement the technical part, improve the visualisation features and fix bugs. The second release is tested within the project by the partners. In the second release, API integration is improved by automatic data download once a month to allow future users to observe the status of the articles in the present and the previous months. The API integration is also integrated with a graphical user interface that allows users to set the parameters for data retrieval, such as the list of articles and the temporal extension of the articles’ chronology. The data visualisation system is connected with the API integration and consists of an overview showing the status of Wikipedia articles and a set of three views to fulfil the desiderata of the three types of stakeholders. It also provides stakeholders with information about the status of Wikipedia articles, the missing articles in the different linguistic editions and discussions around the most recent controversial articles (G. Profeta, web developer).
- Third release to respond to additional requirements emerging from the assessment. The third release is the final release (G. Profeta, web developer).
WP4: Data analysis and validation of the visualisation tool
[edit]The research validates the effectiveness of the interactive visualisation tool in conveying relevant data to analyse and monitor sustainability and climate change, actionable insights for decision-making, strategic communication, and article improvements.
- Conduction of two user tests, online at the end of the first and second releases, with the involvement of representatives of all the project stakeholders. The first user test checks whether the visualisation tool fulfils user needs and if the visualisations are accurate and reliable by comparing a selection of articles with their representation within the tool. The second test aims to identify usability issues. Every test consists of free navigation of the tool, the request for performing a set of two workflows for visualising data and a form with a set of questions about the overall experience. The tests involve the entire research team.
- Collaborative analytics workshop involving the entire research team (including the institutions “Wiki in Africa”, “Wikimedistas de Uruguay”, “Open Climate Campaign”, the Wikipedia communities and the researchers in sustainability and climate change) is organised with 3 working groups and a final plenary session, to analyse the data emerging from the visualisations. The online workshop lasts around 2 hours, allowing the research team to discuss the insights emerging from the visualisations. The workshop produced a report (M. Pucciarelli, G. Profeta, L. Morici, C. Scapozza and partners).
- Use of the visualisation tool and assessment based on the results of the data analysis. The three target groups are involved in assessing the tool:
- Researchers in the field of climate change are asked to analyse data as expert reviewers to assess the status (quality and quantity) of information related to sustainability and climate change within Wikipedia. The analysis explores the parameters of the selected articles and the tool's effectiveness in reporting them. It aims to provide an overall understanding of the current issues of the selected articles, including lack of information and references, biases and misinformation, and controversial articles. The analysis also includes the size of articles, lead sections and talk pages, the number of images and clean-up tags. The quality assessment focuses on the references mentioned in a selection of articles to provide information about the current sources used to write Wikipedia content about sustainability and climate change in terms of low relevance (according to h-index) and biases; the review provides suggestions on how sources can be improved. The data collected and their analysis are shared as open data, and they produce a paper.
- Institutions are asked to use the tool in their work: they design their engagement strategies for volunteers and data providers, and they communicate using the tool with stakeholders (such as potential partners and grantmakers). The partners “Wiki in Africa”, “Wikimedistas de Uruguay” and “Open Climate Campaign” will be using the tool in their work, assessing its relevance and effectiveness and reporting on it; their work will contribute to community engagement.
- Volunteers are asked to use the tool to identify content which can be improved. Through one-day edit-a-thons organised in three different locations and two online “Writing Weeks”, volunteers test the tool and contribute to improving articles related to sustainability and climate change. Edit-a-thons are events usually organised in a library to engage volunteers in editing articles by providing them with references and involving experts (Gluza et al., 2021). “Writing Weeks” are online campaigns used within the Wikimedia communities to involve volunteers in improving content related to a specific topic. The institutions involved in the project and the research team facilitate and support the organisation of the events and analyse their results using the existing online monitoring tool for events (Wikimetrics and Programs and Events Dashboard), performance metrics, participant observation, feedback and semi-structured qualitative interviews.
WP5: Impact Evaluation
[edit]The impact evaluation aims to evaluate the use and impact of the tool.
- Decision-making, support in designing strategies and communicating with stakeholders. The evaluation consists of collecting feedback from the partner institutions through qualitative interviews (M. Pucciarelli, I. Pensa, L. Morici).
- Community engagement. Starting from the initial analysis of the state of the art of the selected articles, it investigates the improvement of the articles in terms of increase of the content, integration of new relevant scientific publications and the creation of clusters of articles more interconnected. Through data analysis, comparative analysis, performance metrics, participant observation and analysis of talk pages and events, a report is produced about the engagement of volunteers and their feedback (G. Profeta, web developer, M. Pucciarelli, I. Pensa, L. Morici).
- The data are used to produce a paper (M. Pucciarelli, G. Profeta, L. Morici, I. Pensa).
- At the end of the evaluation, all the data visualisations produced and the insights gathered will be openly released and discussed with Wikipedia communities; the full documentation will be shared on Meta-wiki pages and linked to the talk pages of relevant projects and archived on OSF (M. Pucciarelli, G. Profeta).
WP6: Research dissemination
[edit][Please refer to the relevance and impact session]
3.3. Risks
[edit]| Risk | Mitigation strategy |
| Selection of not pertinent and/or biased set of articles | Active involvement of Wikipedia communities through the WikiProjects on sustainability and climate change. Validation of the list of articles (WP1). |
| Bugs within the visualisation tool | Development of three releases. Implementation of two user tests (WP3). |
| The visualisation tool does not fulfil user requirements | Adoption of user research methods (WP2). Organisation of a participatory design workshop with users (WP3). Implementation of user tests and assessments (WP4). |
| The visualisation tool is not used by Wikipedia communities | Active involvement of Wikipedia communities and Wikimedia institutions since the start of the project (WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4). Spreading information about the tool at the most relevant Wikipedia events (Wikimania) (WP6). Use of the Wikimedia Foundation community hosting (WP3). |
| The visualisation tool becomes obsolete and it is not maintained | Active involvement of Wikipedia communities to identify long-term user needs (WP1). Implementation of a tool that allows updating the set of articles over time (WP3). Release of the tool in open source to allow updates, reuse and forking (WP6). |
4 Schedule and milestones
[edit]The project lasts four years (48 months) to allow the use and assessment of the tool and its evaluation.
M1: Set of articles in four languages
M2: Set of user requirements for researchers, institutions and volunteers: a) meetings at Wikimania
M3: Participatory design workshop
M4: First release of the visualisation tool
M5: Second release of the visualisation tool: a)
M6: Third release of the visualisation tool
M7: Use and assessment of the visualisation tool by researchers, institutions and volunteers: a and b) two user tests to identify technical and usability issues; c) Collaborative analytics workshop; d) 3 edit-a-thons and 2 Writing Weeks; e) reports of the three assessments to evaluate how the visualisation tool fulfils target groups’ needs.
M8: Report with the analysis of all the assessments and of the community engagement and content improved
M9: Conferences and scientific publications: a) Wikimania, b) FOSDEM, c) 2 papers on climate change and the tool.
M10: Visualisation tool documentation and research report.
| 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WPs | 1-3 | 4-6 | 7-9 | 10-12 | 1-3 | 4-6 | 7-9 | 10-12 | 1-3 | 4-6 | 7-9 | 10-12 | 1-3 | 4-6 | 7-9 | 10-12 |
| 1
Definition of the dataset of articles to be investigated |
M1 | |||||||||||||||
| 2
Definition of user requirements |
M2 | M2
2a |
||||||||||||||
| 3
Implementation of the visualisation tool |
M3 | M4 | M5 | M6 | ||||||||||||
| 4
Data analysis and validation of the visualisation tool |
M7
7a |
M7
7c |
M7
7d |
M7
7d |
M7
7d |
M7
7e |
||||||||||
| 5
Impact Evaluation |
M8 | |||||||||||||||
| 6
Research dissemination |
M9
9a |
M9
9b |
M9
9a |
M9
9b |
M9
9c |
M9
9a |
M9
9b |
M9
9c |
M9
9a |
M10 |
5 Relevance and impact
[edit]Scientific relevance
[edit]The research is relevant to visual analytics and social studies. Applying participatory design methods produces and evaluates strategies for identifying design solutions that visually map the knowledge produced by Wikipedia communities and their knowledge gaps. It also supports community engagement and the improvement of content. Within the contemporary debate about the role and limitations of design methods in supporting democratic processes, the project contributes by identifying procedures for supporting online communities in designing their visualisation tools in participatory design settings. The project actively contributes to open science with its open data, the production of open and libre software, and the support of volunteers, civic society, and citizen science. The visualisation tool is released under an open license in Wikimedia Toolforge (https://admin.toolforge.org/), and the source code is available on Wikimedia GitLab for anyone to branch out and improve it. The interactive visualisation tool is designed to map different sets of Wikipedia articles, and it provides researchers with a tool that can be customised to keep track of the spread of their research topics on Wikipedia.
Publication of research results, open science and ethical considerations
[edit]The research results will be disseminated within the visual analytics and Wikipedia communities; presenting the tool to the Wikimedia movement is also essential to trigger future maintenance. The research will be proposed at the International Conference on Information Visualisation Theory and Applications (IVAPP) 2028, FOSDEM Free Open Source Developers’ European Meeting’ in Brussels February 2026, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) international meeting and DARIAH-CH, Graph Conference, and at Wikimania 2026 in Paris and Wikimania 2027. Participation in conferences is meant to discuss the tool and its usability. Two scientific articles will document the results in a Gold or Diamond Open Access journal. One article will focus on climate change and the results of the visualisations, and another will focus on the tool and its scalability. Relevant outlets include First Monday, the Journal of Open Humanities Data, New Media and Society, and Social Media and Society. All the project documentation, including the report, follows the FAIR and CARE data principles and respects ethical considerations. Research content will be released by default with the double license CC BY-SA and CC BY; data will be released in CC0. Sensitive data will not be shared. Partners and participants in the interviews will have to sign a consent to release their interviews anonymised under CC0 or attributed under CC BY 4.0; participants in the interviews will be able to decide if they want their recordings and transcript to be stored privately or publicly or eliminated at the end of the research. Datasets are associated with a DOI on Zenodo; the project documentation is also made accessible on Media-wiki, OSF Open Science Framework, and the SUPSI repository.
Use-inspired approach
[edit]Using a use-inspired approach, the research addresses the social need for better sustainability and climate change information. It supports civil society, active citizenship, and researchers in monitoring, producing, and improving information.
Information related to sustainability and climate change
[edit]By focusing on sustainability and climate change content, the research practically responds to a contemporary and societal need for quality information that is easily accessible and provided in many languages about an important topic at the centre of policies and activism.
By focusing on Wikipedia articles, the research responds to the needs of active communities and addresses powerful existing tools and a vast audience. Wikipedia articles receive 20 billion views per month and are available in over 300 linguistic editions. Furthermore, Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are released with open licenses and tools that allow reuse for all purposes. They use open and standard formats and an open infrastructure based on open and libre software, compliant with Open Access, Open Data, Open Science, Open Governance and the FAIR data principles. Addressing Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects means contributing to a mainstream source of information that is widely reused.
Support to Volunteers and Community Engagement
[edit]The research project directly impacts the work implemented by active online volunteers. It produces an interactive visualisation tool that supports editors and campaign organisers in planning their initiatives, facilitating community engagement and monitoring the impact of their contribution to topics of concern. By involving the Wikimedia communities, the project targets the largest existing multilingual communities of online volunteers. Wikimedia communities are communities of scope committed to free knowledge with over 300,000 active editors and 100 million registered users.
The project bridges the Wikimedia communities with research methodologìies, collaboratively designs a visualisation tool to respond to their needs, and provides the source code under free license to be reused to visually analyse other relevant topics within Wikipedia.
Expected practical use of the research results (already documented)
[edit]The preliminary project “Wikipedia and the Italian School” presented in the Research plan, which started in 2020 and is currently ongoing, has already shown this research's relevance for institutions and volunteers. Wikimedia Italia and the volunteers active on Wikipedia in Italian have successfully used the tool as a strategic communication tool and as an operative tool to improve content related to the Italian syllabus. Furthermore, the visualisation tool has been adopted by the institutions and communities in Uruguay and Ghana, which have forked the code and developed a simplified version to explore articles related to their national school system (Wikidata:Q124041029).
As presented in the collaboration session of the research plan, the proposal has already received the endorsement of a series of institutions and projects that involve a wide number of communities and countries. Within those collaborations, the institutions have already confirmed their interest in using the tool, testing it and contributing to its evaluation. The associations Wikimedistas de Uruguay and Wiki in Africa are already active in activities related to climate change, and they are involved in their work in a wide network of countries in Latin America and Africa. This research is also endorsed by the international project Open Climate Campaign by Creative Commons, SPARK and EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) with the support of Open Society Foundations and Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin (https://openclimatecampaign.org/). We did not involve institutions which are not specifically working on the topic of climate change.
Further potentialities of the tool
[edit]The interactive visualisation tool can monitor and evaluate a set of articles related to any topic (i.e. cultural heritage, museums, municipalities, topics taught in different school systems, and specific disciplinary areas). The tool can serve the active communities of Wikimedia. It is also a tool facilitating the communication of online activities implemented on Wikipedia, responding to the needs of the 38 Wikimedia chapters, 2 thematic organisations and 141 user groups (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates) addressing stakeholders and a wider audience.
The visualisation tool also has the potential to become an analytically insightful resource for social studies and outreach initiatives. Moreover, it can be employed as an education tool, providing insights and information on those topics within a peer-produced collective knowledge.
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