Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Report
| VIZWP | Project | Activities | Articles | Requirements | Tool | DMP | Report | Credits |
Reports of the project Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change.
Project objectives and results
[edit]| Aim | Objectives | Research questions | Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supporting democratic processes through design and data visualisation methods. | Producing an analysis and evaluation of online content, with a focus on the creation and improvement of content related to sustainability and climate change. | What is the status (quality and quantity) of information and knowledge gaps related to sustainability and climate change within Wikipedia? | Definition of the dataset of articles to be investigated |
| Impact Evaluation | |||
| Supporting community engagement by allowing online communities – institutions and volunteers – to analyse, plan, and take action around a social matter of concern. | 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? | Definition of user requirements | |
| Implementation of the visualisation tool | |||
| Data analysis and validation of the visualisation tool | |||
| Producing new knowledge on the use of participatory design methods and visual analytics methods. | Impact Evaluation | ||
| Research dissemination | |||
Activities and outputs
[edit]| WP | Description | Tasks | Output | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WP1 | Definition of the dataset of articles to be investigated | 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. |
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List of articles - dataset |
| 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 |
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Dataset | ||
| Identification of relevant clusters of articles, according to Wikipedia categories and Wikidata proprieties |
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List of clusters
Clusters included in the dataset | ||
| Identification of the coverage of the selected articles on Wikipedia in Spanish, French and Italian |
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Dataset | ||
| WP2 | Definition of user requirements targeting institutions, volunteers and researchers.
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 |
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| 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) | Online focus group of 1 hour and a half | |||
| 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 | ||||
| WP3 | Implementation of the visualisation tool | 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 | Participatory design workshop | |
| 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). | First release of the visualisation tool | |||
| 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). | Second release of the visualisation tool | |||
| Third release to respond to additional requirements emerging from the assessment. The third release is the final release (G. Profeta, web developer). | Third release of the visualisation tool | |||
| WP4 | Data analysis and validation of the visualisation tool
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:1 | ||||
| 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
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 | ||
| 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 | ||||
| The data are used to produce a paper | Paper | |||
| 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 | ||||
| WP6 | Research dissemination | Presentation of the tool to the Wikimedia movement (essential also 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 | ||||
| Wikimania 2026 in Paris | ||||
| Wikimania 2027 | ||||
| Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, and communities - suggested by a reviewer. Bergen, Norway on October 18 — 22, 2025. The next submission deadline is May 13, 2025. | ||||
| ECSCW European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Suggested by a reviewer. June 30th – July 4th, 2025 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK | ||||
Two scientific articles will document the results in a Gold or Diamond Open Access journal.
Relevant outlets include First Monday, the Journal of Open Humanities Data, New Media and Society, and Social Media and Society. |
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| 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. | DMP Data Management Plan |
List of reports
[edit]- Report 2025 TBD