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Grants:Project/John Cummings/Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO 2017-2018/Final

< Grants:Project | John Cummings/Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO 2017-2018


Report accepted
This report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2016-17 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

We have created the infrastructure for the UN to share their content on Wikimedia projects and understand the value of doing so. We did this through producing a great deal of documentation to help them and others understand why and how to share knowledge and content as well as some of the missing basic infrastructure from Wikidata to import data systematically. In addition we found ways to engage the UN in Wikimedia activities including promoting Wiki Loves competitions and running a large-scale gender gap event.

As well as documentation about importing data, we released an initial version of a FormWizard and Wiki page  based process to help people track, document, and request data imports. While many more versions of this process will be needed to improve usability, it’s a big step in the right direction and provides the basis for future discussion around this topic. A total of 36,000 statements were added to Wikidata, along with 16,300 entities matched to Wikidata items.

Project Goals

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Please copy and paste the project goals from your proposal page. Under each goal, write at least three sentences about how you met that goal over the course of the project. Alternatively, if your goals changed, you may describe the change, list your new goals and explain how you met them, instead.

1. UNESCO’s publication workflows incorporate sharing open license content on Wikimedia projects.

We have set up all categories, metrics tools and documentation for UNESCO to share their content, publication staff understand the importance of sharing content on Wikimedia. They encourage and help staff from other UN agencies  to share to content also.

2. Support other Intergovernmental Organisations and the wider public to share content on Wikimedia projects.

We worked with many UN agencies and other IGOs to help them understand the impact of sharing their content on Wikimedia projects, we began to help several share their content (which led to the large impact in the grant period that followed. The documentation we wrote was created for the UN but written for a general audience, all focussed on understanding Wikimedia projects and practical guides for sharing content. By creating a centralised data import process it is easier for external organisations to track data imported, as well as discover other data imports that may be in progress.

3. Support Wikimedia contributors to easily discover and use UNESCO content and the documentation produced.

We now have a functional Wikiproject United Nations with all the content from the UN agencies available on Wikimedia. In addition the pages include automated metrics tools to help agencies understand the value of sharing content.

The Data donation documentation page is now linked from the Wikidata main page, as well as the Community portal making it very discoverable by the wider community. This page also links to all other resources created around the data import process.

Project Impact

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Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

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  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.
Planned measure of success Actual result Explanation
Metric: Text from UNESCO has been added to 1000 pages on Wikipedia, currently UNESCO text has been added to 140 pages. 340 Several staff members have spent time on adding text to Wikipedia from UNESCO publications. They have chosen to focus on improving a smaller number of articles to a higher degree rather than a larger number of articles.
Metric: At least 10,000 files from UNESCO have been added to Wikimedia Commons. 0 new files UNESCO did not make the files available due to delays in transcribing descriptions , however we were able to set up the start of a partnership with Wikimedia Sverige which has led to a long term plan for UNESCO archive files being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons here, with over 2,000 files being uploaded as of 2022.
Metric: That all other IGOs producing text under an open license have a space on Wikiproject United Nations and have some level of involvement in reusing the text on Wikimedia projects e.g suggesting where text can be used. Done There are spaces on Wikiproject United Nations for all UN agencies with open license text. We have designed the page in a way to easily add other agencies including the automated metrics tools to provide results.
Metric: More content is available from UN agencies other than UNESCO on Wikimedia projects. Yes We assisted the European Space Agency to share content on Wikimedia Commons and understand the reach of their content.

The process left in place at UNESCO increases exposure to other UN agencies, more UN agencies shared content in 2019 including FAO.

Metric: That any IGO making content available on Wikimedia projects has a BaGLAMa 2 category set up to measure page views of articles carrying their images as I have done with the European Space Agency. Done List available on BaGLAMa 2. Note: In 2021 the tool owner Magnus Manske changed the tool to allow anyone to add categories themselves.
Metric: A Massviews link is set up to measure page views for articles that use their open license text like UNESCO does. Done including instructions for how to set up massviews lists for any other organisation. There is a technical issue meaning that there may be double counting of pages because the template we are using is becoming more popular and the areas we are sharing knowledge in are quite similar.
Metric: That the Free-content attribution template which is used to credit open license text is used 5,000 times. 700 in English, unclear in the other 15 languages the template is available in. The template has been used by several UN agencies to share their text, it appears also to have been more widely used in the community, especially in English Wikipedia where there are extensive instructions.

Some IGOs use open licences that are not compatible with Wikipedia eg NC or ND, or there is a technical barrier to using their text e.g CC BY-SA 4.0 which cannot be used until Wikipedia updates to CC 4.0

However the template we created to reuse open license text has been translated into 15 languages meaning the ability to use open license text on Wikipedia is quite widely accessible.

Metric: That 10 other Wikiprojects use at least one of pieces of documentation that I have developed. Done Our Wikidata data donation page has been translated into 40 languages.

At least one, the page design and guidance we set up for Wiki4Women has been reused by Wikimedia UK on their 14 workshop collaboration with Amnesty International.

Metric: Documentation that we have developed is used more widely including by other IGOs. Yes Dataset Imports pages and documentation pages Wikidata:Open_data_publishing

: People can understand and import data more easily and collaborate with others and an RFC to outline the direction for improving the process and documentation for Wikidata, a central place to plan improvements.

In addition we have encouraged IGOs to use existing documentation we have developed.

The main Wikiproject United Nations page on collaboration is widely used by the UN to understand how they can work with Wikimedia, we keep it up to date with new projects and activities. This was the main place we showed the body of work to show the benefit of using open license text on Wikipedia, specially for organisations considering adopting Open Access. Wikipedia has more information.

Metric: That the documentation is easy to find for external organisations and that other Wikimedians have started using it in their projects. We have made it easier to find by making it more integrated into existing places on Wikimedia and linking from high traffic pages. Published initial version of the Data Import Guide.

Created draft documentation improvements for commonly used tools.

Metric: UNESCO promotes the Wiki Loves competitions in 2017/18, with the hope of other UN bodies also promoting them. Yes The Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Africa competitions were promoted by UNESCO on their social media channels, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Metric: At least one other Wikimedia meeting is hosted at UNESCO during this grant period. Planned but not hosted until 2019 We hosted the GLAM Wiki Coordinators meeting which Liam Wyatt runs.
Metric: That Wikiproject United Nations becomes available in 3 other languages, most effort will be put into the other official UN languages. No translation We focussed more on getting translation on individual resources we were creating. Also with the introduction of the new search functions on Commons and Structured Data on Commons
Metric: That at least 3 blog posts are created for major Wikimedia blogs about the tools and resources created. 2 We found the most effective outreach was done through social media and presentations (e.g. WikidatCon 2017)

Two blog posts were published relating to the data import process and new resources created (Wikimedia blog, Histropedia blog).

Story

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Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting antecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

  • This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
  • Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

The UN is an extremely important partner for Wikimedia, one of its primary goals is to collate information from across the world and to share that knowledge with the public. Like other large knowledge institutions, the experts who work for them understand the value of sharing knowledge and content with Wikimedia. However they have limited time and many other options to share information and work with external partners. The key issue is Wikimedia’s lack of investment in basic documentation to help people outside the movement understand it and become part of it. This along with the high level of hostility to new users, especially if they identify themselves as being part of an organisation made us focus the majority of our efforts on basic documentation to support external partners. We hope that this makes our work and the work of other people working on partnerships easier.

Survey(s)

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If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

No surveys completed.

Other

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Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

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Methods and activities

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Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

Non public activities

There are some outcomes that can not currently be made public, we have shared these with WMF grant staff.

New dataset imports space

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Wikidata Dataset Import

Many organisations are interested in sharing their data with Wikidata but there was no clear path to do so. Additionally there was no way to understand what datasets exist on a topic, which of those have been imported into Wikidata, or how up to date previously imported datasets are.

Wikidata Dataset Imports is a first attempt at centralising the record of dataset imports from external sources into Wikidata. It’s hoped that this will address the problems listed above and help us move towards a more consistent approach to data import and synchronisation with external sources.

Wikidata Dataset Imports is the main starting point when a new dataset is being imported (or proposed for importing). A FormWizard form was setup in order to make the process as easy as possible, particularly for people who are unfamiliar with WikiText syntax.

A considerable amount of work went into the FormWizard component of this page. After the draft was created, Chris “Jethro” Schilling from the Wikimedia Foundation kindly donated lots of his time as one of the few people in the community with knowledge of FormWizard. He completed all of the initial setup of FormWizard configuration files and built a new template that could interface with FormWizard to automatically categorise the resulting pages. Chris also taught us how to use FormWizard for ourselves over a series of Skype sessions. Following this, Nav was able to take over the ongoing improvements of the FormWizard template for the dataset import pages.

The new process and related documentation pages were presented on open data capacity building work at Wikimedia Conference, as well as at

Data Imported into Wikidata

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UNESCO Institute of Statistics

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Note: We had planned to import a large amount of additional data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. However, this was paused because of a lack of proper support for high volumes of historical data being added to individual Wikidata items. It was decided we should pause this and resume at a later time when more functionality was available (mainly the ability to query for Tabular data stored on Wikimedia Commons.

Directory of Open Access Journals

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  • Matched 11000 publications from Directory of Open Access Journals dataset (including 7700 manually matched by John with some community help in Mix'n'Match).
  • Matched 5000 publishers listed in the DOAJ to Wikidata items (3600 manually matched in mix’n’match).
  • Imported ISSN and/or EISSN id statements for all 11000 journals listed in the DOAJ data (around 15,000 edits in total).
  • Imported 10,700 licence statements for journal items (bubble chart showing CC licences used by Journals listed in the DOAJ)
  • Imported 5000 country statements, added to matched publishers used in the DOAJ.
  • Full list of imports and queries shown on the dataset summary sheet

Other imported data:

  • Provided training to the Wikimedian in Residence at Edinburgh University and intern staff relating to data import from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft (see their blog post here for more information). This was used as an  opportunity to test the data import workflows that we had designed with a very different kind of data source, which  provided useful feedback on areas for improvement.

Collaboration with Structured Data on Commons team

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Initial discussions with Sandra about overlapping requirements for the data import process and the upcoming Structured Data on Commons (meeting notes).

WikidataCon 2017, attendance and presentation

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Data import: An overview of the current system, and idea exchange for the future direction submission page / etherpad

Wikimedia Conference

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Attended the 2017 Wikimedia Conference and gave a presentation on Wikidata Dataset Imports. The conference provided many ideas and clarifications on the approach and process of working with Wikidata. This led to the creation of the RFC on the data import process.

Wikipedia training for Swedish Government Delegation at UNESCO

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John ran an afternoon workshop with the Swedish delegation to UNESCO after the Wiki4Women event to help them better understand Wikimedia projects.

Working with UNESCO staff to share knowledge

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We are continuing to work with UNESCO staff to share their knowledge on Wikipedia through reusing existing UNESCO text from publications and the website. Having created the process, documentation and instructions to share open license content on English Wikipedia, we have work with Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia France to translated it into French and Spanish. We now have 255 pages which reuse open license text from UNESCO, these pages receive 4.3 million page views per month.  

Documentation

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Wikidata Open Data Publishing

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Many organisations are interested in sharing data on Wikidata and more widely with the public. Whilst there are many high quality individual resources for open data there were no guides taking organisations through the whole user journey of understanding and publishing open data.

Requests for comment/Mapping and improving the data import process

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Whilst we have achieved significant improvements with the documentation on Wikipedia, there is so much more to do, outside the scope of this grant and the time available. Currently the Wikidata import process is a bit of a dark art, with many steps poorly understood outside of the group of people already doing it. To help collate existing resources and plan the new resources needed for different kinds of contributor we started an RFC.

Wikidata in Wikimedia Projects

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Some Wikimedia projects, especially English Wikipedia have hostility towards the use of Wikidata on their projects. This is at least in part due to a lack of understanding of Wikidata, the page provides information to try to avoid, improve or correct any issues and address common misunderstandings or concerns about Wikidata. It will also provide an overview of what is and isn’t currently possible when reusing data from Wikidata on other Wikimedia projects and improvements planned in the future.

An overview of Wikimedia and outlines areas of potential collaboration for the UN

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Several UN agencies are starting to release content under an open license showing interest in collaborating with the Wikimedia movement. There are several people independently working with the UN from different chapters and user groups. The page provides an overview of Wikimedia and outlines areas of potential collaboration between UN agencies and Wikimedia with examples.

Page design and formatting

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Over the past few years I’ve created many documentation pages which have used many existing styles from other resources, I’ve also created a few myself. There was no easy way to reuse the styles people had created. This page provides a structure to share formats, including where they are used and ‘blanks’ that people can reuse more easily. The page also has many of the resources needed to get started with understanding the basics of creating more attractive pages, without needing to learn everything first.

Mix n' Match matching tips

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Having worked on many dataset imports it became clear that there were inconsistencies between the matching different people were doing, with some instructions being ambiguous. These tips try to minimise these variations and errors.

Extracting Graphics from Open License Publications

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1000s of organisations produce publications under an open licence but do not release the graphics contained within them as individual assets, meaning the end user must extract them themselves and upload them to Commons. There was no documentation of this process.

Wiki4Women, International Women's Day event

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On International Womens Day UNESCO, Wikimedia France, Les sans pagEs and Wikimedia Foundation collaborated on an event for International Womens Day at UNESCO HQ in Paris

We created pages for online participation and worked with Women in Red to create some basic guidance for new editors on how to write articles about women (9 simple rules). The pages created for the event were designed to minimise the learning curve for new contributors and are available in the 6 UN languages.

The event was funded by the governments of Canada, Iceland, Sweden, as well as the European Union, Fondation CHANEL, Institut national de l'audiovisuel, France Médias Monde. This demonstrates a clear interest from these organisations that they understand the value of addressing the gender gap and could possibly approached for further funding in the future.

The page design and guidance has been reused by Wikimedia UK on their 14 workshop collaboration with Amnesty International.

Wikimedia page_design_and_formatting

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We shared the design work we have done on Wikimedia pages to make them easily reusable, with templates for each example to reuse.

Rewrote the Flickr2Commons documentation

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Completely rewrote the Flickr2Commons documentation with step by step instructions. This is one of the main tools used to upload images from partners.

Wikidata:Data_donation

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Completely rewrote the Data Donation page with the needs of data partners in mind using what we have learned from working with UN agencies.

Wikidata:Data_Import_Guide

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New page created with multiple sub-pages describing each step in the process of importing data. The steps listed are intended to help editors through various pain points we had experienced ourselves. It also guides the editor towards community discussion and consultation with relevant Wiki Projects.

We have tried to cover the most commonly needed documentation, but this page will need ongoing improvement as there are a large number of different methods that can be used for importing data,combined with a range of  different formats of source data.

Wiki Loves Earth photo essay template

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Created a process for Wiki Loves competitions participants to easily and simply create photo essays using only Visual Editor. Shared with the WLE organisers.

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

See above in the documentation section of the methods and activities section.

Learning

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The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

We chose to document our learnings in more widely used spaces, which are outlined in the activities section.

The main things that have worked well are:

  • UNESCO are very willing to run projects and promote open licensing.
  • Access to many other UN agencies interested in open licensing and sharing content on Wikimedia.
  • Help from many different chapters and user groups to work on projects.
  • Appreciation for documentation produced.
  • Gathering community feedback about issues with the data import process that need solving.
  • New dataset imports area has made it significantly easier to add new import projects and monitor the status of existing data imports.
  • Use of FormWizard forms and Visual Editor to reduce the need for advanced knowledge of wikitext when when interacting with the data imports area. This process can be used as a proof of concept for other places on Wikimedia projects.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Wikimedia community members complaining or actively stopping our work, including harassing people we were working with, deleting their work, their user page etc. Harassment and rudeness to new editors with little recourse or discouragement.
  • Lots of bugs in software or broken or missing software meaning we couldn’t carry out some tasks e.g Pattypan stopped working.
  • Lots of missing documentation meaning we couldn’t carry out activities without first writing the documentation which took a lot of extra time.
  • Other Wikidata editors changed data on Wikidata items after we’d created, discussed and documented a good model to follow. Tools available made it very time consuming to check what had changed.
  • Difficulty presenting statistical data on Wikidata items without overloading them with statements. This prevented us pressing ahead with the remaining content available from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics.
  • Short term grants meant we couldn’t plan long term with partner organisations, who mostly work on a longer timeframe.
  • Misunderstanding of Conflict of Interest guidelines by experienced editors.
  • Data added to Wikidata is often made incorrect by other contributors, there are no tools to monitor, maintain and correct errors so data added cannot be trusted.
  • Most data imported into Wikidata is done by individuals who are not communicating with the community about their efforts. No central place to track or discuss what has or hasn’t been done yet.
  • The main tools used in the data import process need a lot of problems fixed and new functionality added. You need to resort to editing via the API for certain types of data that are not fully supported yet.

Other recommendations

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If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

  • Properly fund partnership work within Wikimedia as WMF staff members, including tools, documentation and long term positions to build relationships with staff in partner organisations.
  • Use some paid software development to improve widely used tools that have been created by volunteers who may not have time to maintain them.
  • Support further development and integration of Flow and other tools that help make the community more accessible to outside people and organisations. Being able to ask simple questions without first needing to learn Wikitext.

Next steps and opportunities

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Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Budget table

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We used 100% of the funds we were given, we did not receive the contingency travel budget. Exchange rates calculated on the 14th March 2017, grant requested in Euros, not USD.

Item number Category Item description Unit cost Number of units for 12 months Total cost in Euros Total cost US Dollars Notes Source of funding Used
1 Venue Senior staff time including directors, staff time for meetings and research related to the project.

A large office, office services (printing, photocopying, etc)

Meeting rooms for internal and external meeting (e.g the rooms used for the GLAMwiki Coordinators Meeting were provided free of charge).

1 €15,450.56 UNESCO standard costing of 13% of project costs. UNESCO All
2 Project management UNESCO Wikimedian in Residence salary and taxation €25.64 1950 €50,000 $53052.50 John Cummings This grant All
3 Project management Wikidata expert salary and taxation €25.64 390 €10,000 $10,610.50 Navino Evans This grant All
4 Project management Software developer time N/A N/A €9424.62 $10,000 Staff time and contractor time to improve sharing UNESCO content on Wikimedia Commons using the Wikimedia API UNESCO All
5 Project Management UNESCO staff time for development of professional development module. €9424.62 $10,000 An estimated minimum investment of senior management staff time based on the current level of investment. UNESCO All
6 Project management UNESCO Communication and Information sector staff time to recommend text and add information to Wikipedia. €9424.62 $10,000 An estimated minimum investment of staff time based on the current level of investment. UNESCO All
7 Project management UNESCO Education sector staff time to recommend text and add information to Wikipedia. €9424.62 $10,000 An estimated minimum investment of staff time based on the current level of investment. UNESCO All
8 Project management UNESCO Science sector staff time time to recommend text and add information to Wikipedia. €9424.62 $10,000 An estimated minimum investment of staff time based on the current level of investment. UNESCO All
9 Travel Travel budget  and accomodation. 1 €3000 $3183.15 Travel budget for John Cummigs This grant All
10 Travel Travel and accomodation 1 €1000 $1,061.05 Travel budget for Navino Evans This grant All
11 Travel Conference fees and Accommodation 1 €2827.38 $3000 Travel and accommodation expenses for conferences and events provided by UNESCO. UNESCO All
12 Travel International travel insurance 1 €200 $212.21 I have a policy in place through Countrywide. John Cummings All
13 Equipment Canon 6D camera 1 €3000 $3183.15 Canon 6D camera and lens which will be used to document the residency and projects. John Cummings All
14 Equipment Asus UX305 Laptop 1 €800 $848.84 Used by John Cummings during meetings, conferences and other travel. John Cummings All
15 Equipment Acer Aspire V15 Nitro 1 €900 $954.94 Used by Navino Evans during his work. Navino Evans All
16 Contingency travel Unanticipated travel expenses 1 €250 $265.26 Contingency travel budget

Risk probability: 25%

Project support obtained from UNESCO €68,900
Existing equipment and services €4,900
Project funding requested from Wikimedia Foundation €64,000
Contingency funding requested €250
Total project cost (excluding contingency) €134,301.04

Remaining funds

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Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

  • No

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

  • -

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

  • Yes

Confirmation of project status

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!

The Wikimedia Foundation grants team were understanding and flexible to issues that arose in the logistics of setting up the transfer of the grant funds. They have been consistently helpful and have been funding this work for several years. However this work is not sustainable given we are reliant on short term grants ie Wikimedia outreach work isn’t an available career path. This is a significant issue when working with partners who plan years in advance.

There are many structural issues within Wikimedia that are making many projects, not just ours, have issues. We are  only able to mitigate some of these issues by using our social network within Wikimedia, something that isn’t available to many people, especially not new people.

Documentation is poor and inconsistent in many areas which leads to many poor outcomes:

  • Lack of understanding for new contributors what the rules are
  • Lack of direction for new contributors
  • Potential new editors are dissuaded from contributing.
  • Wikipedia editors have trouble understanding Wikidata, which significantly contributes to the general resistance to Wikidata driven content in Wikipedia.

There is also a high potential for damage to partnerships through poor behaviour of community members which is part of wider harassment, community health and kindness issues on some Wikimedia projects.

It will be difficult to form data partnerships until we have better systems in place for tracking completeness and/or ‘protecting’ data imported from a data partner. Many organisations won’t bother because of the difficulty in maintaining an up to date version. The proposed ‘signed statements’ feature on Wikidata will greatly help in this area once developed.

As all of the tools used by editors are created and maintained by volunteers, there is always a greater need for fixes and new features than can currently be supported by the developers. Help in maintaining these tools from Wikimedia Foundation developers or encouragement from WMF for wider community involvement would have a big impact on the effectiveness of these tools, and hence the number of contributions.

There is a serious issue to resolve around showing statistical data over time with Wikidata. For example population, GDP,  or other metrics that can be stored with date qualifiers to indicate historical values. We had to stop before completing the planned import of data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics because it became apparent that we were seriously impacting the size of Wikidata items for countries and geographical regions. The solution would be to use tabular data on Commons, which is available but can’t yet be queried using the Wikidata Query Service, making it too difficult to reuse and create visualisations.

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