Wikimedia CEE Hub/Tools
WIKIMEDIA CEE HUB
Regional hub covering Central and Eastern Europe
WELCOME TO THE WIKIMEDIA CEE HUB
This is an overview of the research survey done by the Wikimedia CEE Hub
The survey was conducted during August 2024 and we received 44 responses from more than 20 community members.
- Questions in the survey
- Your name or username
- Affiliation
- Which Wikimedia project is your home? On which project are you most active?
- Do you use any tools during your work on any Wikimedia projects?
- If you answered "yes" on the previous question, can you mention some of the used tools?
- Where do you usually find tools that are relevant to you?
- Are you aware of ToolHub?
- If you answered "No", are you interested in CEE Hub to prepare more documentation on this for your community?
- During your work on any Wikimedia project, what are some manual jobs that you are doing constantly, and you are thinking that could be done better via some tool / bot / software feature?
- Did you participate in past editions of the Community Wishlist Survey?
- The Community Wishlist has been restarted, and will be open through the entire year (read more on the link). Will you need support to submit any wish?
- Do you think it would be useful to have a regional list of community wishes?
- In case you have technical knowledge, are you willing to dedicate some of your time to participate in developing the new tools needed for the region?
- Please make your comment/suggestion for the tools in general in your community, in the whole Wikimedia movement and/or something that you want to point out to us.
- Answers from the questions
- N/A, general information available in the responses from the survey
- N/A, general information available in the responses from the survey
- N/A, general information available in the responses from the survey
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- 39 responses (88,6%) said “Yes”; and
- 5 responses (11,4%) said “No”
- The participants in the survey mentioned various tools that they used in their work on Wikimedia projects, in total 55 different tools, which listed in a separate table can be viewed in the appendix of this document. Most used tools are: XTools, Hotcat, Petscan, and Autowikibrowser (AWB).
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- 15 responses (34,1%) said that they found the tools through wiki pages on my Wikimedia project;
- 9 responses (20,5%) said that they have difficulties to find any tool;
- 9 responses (20,5%) said that they ask other Wikimedia from their project to find a tool;
- 8 responses (18,2%) said that they ask people that they know to help them with the tools; and
- 3 responses (6,8%) said they searched on Toolhub to find any tool.
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- Majority of the respondents (29 of them, 69,5%) said “No”; and
- 15 respondents (29,5%) said “Yes”.
- Here are the results in percentages for the question (33 respondents):
- Majority of the respondents (25 of them, 75,8%) said “Yes”; and
- 8 respondents (24,2%) said “No”.
- Respondents have a quite different problems/issues that they faced in their work on the Wikimedia projects, which can be seen in the appendix nr. 2
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- 19 respondents (43,2%) said “No”;
- 15 respondents (34,1%) said “Yes”; and
- 10 respondents (22,7%) said they did not know about this.
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- For the majority of respondents (26 of them, 59,1%) maybe they will need a help;
- 13 respondents (29,5%) said “No”; and
- 5 respondents (11,4%) said “Yes”.
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- Almost everyone (38 of them, 86,4%) thinks that this is a good idea.
- 6 respondents (13,6%) think that it is not necessary.
- Here are the results in percentages for the question:
- 39 respondents (79,5%) do not have required technical knowledge;
- 5 respondents (11,4%) would like to dedicate some time to participate in developing new tools; and
- 4 respondents (9,1%) said “No”.
- The main takeaway from the comments/suggestions is that the editors at some point may not know that some tools exist or they do not know how to use them. Additionally, they would really like to see guides and/or even workshops about the tools.
Appendix Nr. 1
[edit]| Used Tools | Responses |
| XTools | 11 |
| Hotcat | 10 |
| Petscan | 10 |
| Autowikibrowser (AWB) | 7 |
| Toolforge page view stats | 7 |
| Cat-a-lot | 6 |
| Earwig's Copyvio Detector | 6 |
| Crop Tool | 5 |
| Translate tool | 5 |
| Twinkle | 4 |
| iabot | 3 |
| Quarry | 3 |
| Citer tool | 3 |
| Geolocator | 3 |
| diffedit | 2 |
| QuickStatements | 2 |
| WMF Dashboard | 2 |
| Adiutor | 2 |
| PAWS | 2 |
| Wikidata Query Service | 2 |
| Deep out-of-sight | 2 |
| Wikidata description | 2 |
| Commons Mass Description | 1 |
| Find-replace | 1 |
| Keyboard shortcuts | 1 |
| lingua libra | 1 |
| Pattypan | 1 |
| Special characters upper menu | 1 |
| WikiShootme | 1 |
| ConvenientDiscussions | 1 |
| reFill | 1 |
| web2cit | 1 |
| OpenRefine | 1 |
| pywikibot | 1 |
| OrphanTalk | 1 |
| Mass delete | 1 |
| AC/DC | 1 |
| Depictor | 1 |
| View-it | 1 |
| GLAMorous | 1 |
| Hashtag tool | 1 |
| Computer-aided tagging | 1 |
| SWViewer | 1 |
| TABernacle | 1 |
| Listeria | 1 |
| Jury tool | 1 |
| wikEd | 1 |
| wikiblame | 1 |
| Infobox translator (my own tool) | 1 |
| flickr2commons | 1 |
| Flickypedia | 1 |
| JavaScript Wiki Browser | 1 |
| Bullseye | 1 |
| WikiScan | 1 |
| LocatorTool | 1 |
Appendix Nr. 2
[edit]| Manual work | Responses |
| typos | 4 |
| updating articles after templates has new params | 3 |
| Changes for inconsistent formatting | 2 |
| change the name of categories | 2 |
| Simplifying the code of tables | 1 |
| Images description on commons | 1 |
| Wikidata imports | 1 |
| navigation templates | 1 |
| small numerous articles (ie. villages) | 1 |
| searching for specific words/characters in text/code | 1 |
| Gender marking in job titles | 1 |
| insert archive links in derived templates | 1 |
| colouring tables | 1 |
| fight against childish vandalism | 1 |
| Manually categorizing new articles | 1 |
| grouping of links | 1 |
| creating diagrams, graphs | 1 |
| listing all template params | 1 |
| making new lexemes quickly | 1 |
| adding videos | 1 |
| Resolving reference issues | 1 |
| formatting references | 1 |
| Short Description | 1 |
| Code formatting improvements | 1 |
| searching references/images | 1 |
| simplifying the Wikidata entries | 1 |
Key points
[edit]The respondents in the survey used tools during their work on the Wikimedia projects, or at least they tried to implement the tools in their work. But, they face a lot of difficulties, first to find them, documentation is poor without any examples and/or guides (videos would be preferable), secondly the tools addresses are often changed, leaving a lot of red links across the projects afterwards. Additionally, it seems that we had a lot of tools in the movement, but they are not known to the local communities and so they are not using them.
Creating a list of tools on the address that can be recognizable for everyone can be a much better solution than ToolHub, along with creating examples of the tools and videos examples. Majority of the respondents would like to see something about this from the CEE Hub, as they do not know that ToolHub exists in the first place.
In the survey we received a lot of manual work tasks that respondents are doing quite often, and although for some of them it has some solutions even right now, for some we should work with the community members who are developers or with Wikimedia Foundation to create those tools.
Also, respondents would like to have a regional Community Wishlist.
In the comments section, they are mentioning that the promotion of the tools among the communities should be much better than the current state, so here should work community members, affiliates and CEE Hub together.
Future goals
[edit]Wikimedia CEE Hub will focus on some of the segments during the Year 3 plan (during 2025) as following:
- Tool discovery improvements (e.g. featured tools)
- Reaching out to volunteers from the survey to understand what they'd like to work on
- Help maintain technical Village pumps in CEE languages.