Grants:IEG/WIGI: Wikipedia Gender Index/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

Having progressed through 2 of its 4 stages, WIGI is on track at the midpoint mark. We conducted user surveys, which we used to build an alpha version of our website. Wigi.wmflabs.org presents many statistics, like how many women biographies were added or removed in a specific Wikipedia, last week. Users can now watch for trends in four aspects of biography gender in the Wiki-verse.

Methods and activities

The WIGI project is organised into 4 phases: Automate, Be seen, Connect & Describe. It’s all on github. We are pleased to report that the first two phases have been completed in on time during the first half of our grant. These two phases were generally concerned with the preliminary research and the development of a website that displays Wikipedia gender statistics - graphs and charts - based on self-updating Wikidata data. Here’s what we did:

Phase Automate

Coding

• Set up of automated weekly scrape using Wikidata Toolkit on WMFLabs, (first time it’s been done.)
• Updated our software to include“Occupation”, and “Field of Work” wikidata properties.
• Write code to compare the differences between our weekly statistics.

Community and Design

• Solicited community input on Visualisations, producing the Survey Report.
• Incorporated that community input on Visualizations.
• Conducted a two design reviews for our web portal.

Phase B

Coding

• Made Front End to Visualizations, using Bokeh.
• Deployed and polished the WIGI-website to http://wigi.wmflabs.org/ (see next secion)

Community and Design

• Entered Wikidata Visualisation Challenge with an social-media-friendly Infographic.
• Presented on WIGI as a featured speaker at Wikimania 2015.
• Presented on WIGI at OpenSym 2015.

Midpoint outcomes

• Our biggest out put is the alpha version of the WIGI web portal
  • It displays four statistics, in two modes: weekly movements, and total of all time.
    • Gender by culture.
    • Gender by country.
    • Gender by date of birth.
    • Gender by Wikipedia language.
  • And gives you access to the raw data that’s being used.
• In an intial survey of Wikipedias about our Project Thirty-Six diverse Wikimedia community members provided responses to our questionnaire. Eleven respondents agreed to stay on to provide input through the rest of the project.
• Research on new statistics we are measuring from community suggestions. Vivek and Harsh’s blog

Finances

Our finances are almost exactly on track, and are logged in very detailed way at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WIGI:_Wikipedia_Gender_Index/Finances

Our initial disbursement was $11,250, and we have spent $11,630. The overrun comes from a few hours of labour mis-guessed, and unaccounted for International wire fees. It would be excellent to readjust the budget an extra $250 upwards to account for the international wire fees, past and future.

Learning

• One of the first challenges the team encountered was there being both paid and unpaid members. Quickly the unpaid volunteer members, became frustrated and left.
• We have never had a meeting at which all team members have been simultaneously present. Because we are in California, Ghana, and India, our timezones are too spread to have meet live. So we have typically just had one-to-one meetings, and let email serve for broadcast messages.
• Video conferencing between our locations has proved difficult if not impossible due to bandwidth and proximity constraints.
• Paying money abroad at a low transfer fee is difficult as well.
• At first we tried to have a non-hierachical management system but because of our lack of face-to-face time and loose organization our productivity was not high. When we moved away from Laissez-faire management style, to a more hands-on approach (homework-in-between-meetings) productivity increased vastly.

What is working well

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns/Git_repository_for_software
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns/Let_the_community_know

Next steps and opportunities

Outlined below are the steps the project intends to accomplish in its second half:

Phase C

• More UI polish on WIGI-website.
• Promote viewing via blogging.
• And have a twitter bot that tweets out latest statistics.
• Implement Usage Counters, so we know how much people are using our site.

Phase D

• Formalize Statistical Observations
  • and write them up.
• Incorporate Social Indicators Feedback in Original Paper
• Add Other Metrics until money runs out.
  • Main page metrics
  • Mean article size
  • Celebrities

etc.

Grantee reflection

Since Max lives close to the Wikimedia San Francisco offices, we’ve been able to meet in person exclusively. We also were able to have meetings at Wikimania and OpenSym, which helped. This has meant that we never had fell too far behind schedule or off track, before a meeting would address it. Marti has been an extremely responsive and supporting Grants Manager. She also for us to have advisor Jonathan Morgan, with whom meeting with is a positive influence on our project, and keeps us focused.