Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/A category-based image page view bot (ID: 22458697)
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Applicant Details[edit]
- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Dominic
- Organization
Digital Public Library Of America
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
I'm a group leader of a Wikimedia User Group (submitted to the Affiliation Committee)., I'm a staff member or contractor in Wikimedia Foundation.
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
I am one of the signatories for Wikimedians of Indiana User Group. I was a Wikimedia contractor from about August 2022-February 2023. The organization DPLA was also a contractor for WMF earlier in 2022, as well as a Project Grant recipient before that.
Main Proposal[edit]
- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
A category-based image page view bot
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2024-04-01 - 2024-12-31
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
International (more than one country across continents or regions) The technology will be developed and run from the United States, but it is a Wikimedia Commons tool applicable to the global Wikimedia community.
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Other (please specify) GLAM-Wiki
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
GLAMs around the world have uploaded millions, and impact metrics in the form of page view analytics is critical to evaluating the success of these projects and convincing institutions to contribute. In recent years, the main tools that the Wikimedia Commons community has relied on for measuring the impact of bulk uploads have been failing. BaGLAMa has become unreliable and often unavailable, and the methodology is flawed. At DPLA, we are the largest GLAM institutional contributor of files to Wikimedia Commons, nearing 4 million total uploads from hundreds of institutions—but this project relies analytics data to continue. There are currently over 1000 categories in BaGLAMa, so this is clearly a need for the whole global community. Our proposed approach is to prototype a tool that uses Wikimedia's AQS mediarequests endpoint to query data for every member of a category, with a template to post that data directly to the Wikimedia Commons category page. This approach is superior to BaGLAMa (even when working) because tracking server requests is not dependent on knowing which images are in which articles at a given time, so we can provide accurate historical data. Without this data, many institutions will be uninterested or unable to contribute to Wikimedia Commons, so the reliable data is important.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
This project involves (1) writing code to generate page view data. (2) documenting the tool for users, and (3) periodically running the bot, with server costs incurred for computing and storage of data for millions of Commons files. Retrieving the data itself is a multi-step process that is not straightforward with the WMF's current published data sources, especially when aggregating it for a given category, which may contain thousands or millions of files in its category tree.
We have already done some initial work determining the feasibility of this project. As part of this project, we developed Template:Views_from_category (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Views_from_category) and retreived data for categories where that template is placed. For example, for the Försvarsfordonsmuseet Arsenalen (Swedish Tank Museum) we have posted data in a table at . We plan to refine this code for the project, and publish documentation, but most of all, the level of querying (requiring the script to run for days on end querying WMF's API) incurs significant AWS server costs.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, (User:Dominic) is a DPLA temporary employee who serves as Director of Community Engagement, and also manages DPLA's Wikimedia work. He is the primary developer of the proposed tool and also DPLA's main Wikimedia community member. Scott Williams, DPLA's Director of Technology, manages DPLA's AWS account and is responsible for maintaining the EC2 server environment.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
The target participants include GLAM-Wiki institutions, particularly participants in the DPLA digital asset pipeline, and Commons users of BaGLAMa. DPLA is an active organizer in this community, and connects to these community members via our network, which includes a working group of leaders. Dominic also engages with the global GLAM-Wiki community via Telegram, Facebook, and other off-wiki means. We actively partner with the WMF Culture and Heritage team.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
We have discussed the prototype in several forums, such as the GLAM-Wiki Telegram group, DPLA's Wikimedia working group, and with meetings with WMF. I ran a first test run with the initial code across all the BaGLAMa categories and notified several of the users who were not DPLA participants and have also added the template to their own categories (such as the Swedish institutions).
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Culture, heritage or GLAM
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt
Learning and metrics[edit]
- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
There will be two different types of learnings from this project:
At the most immediate level, this request would fund an analytics tool that will give us data to evaluate the success of bulk uploads. Therefore, the data will help answer questions about how much usage a given Wikimedia Commons category's (i.e. institution's) images have gotten since upload.
At a higher level, this tool will help inform the ongoing conversations around development of WMF's Commons Impact Metrics and maintenance of Commons analytics tools built on top of it. DPLA has monthly meetings with WMF's Culture & Heritage team (Giovanna Fontanelle), and also participated in the interview stage and the in-person user testing stage of the Commons Impact Metrics project with Virginia Poundstone, and continues to use this experience with metrics to provide feedback.
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 500 | As this request is to support creation of analytics data to evaluate existing projects, we don't expect it to directly lead to new human participants. It is expected that there could be up to 500 or more institutions participating in the project in the sense of using the tool for their page view analytics. |
| Number of editors | 0 | See comments in 18.1 and 18.4; the output for this project isn't really measured in editors. |
| Number of organizers | 1 |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | 0 |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
This project contributes to Wikimedia Commons in the form of analytics data, not files. We expect to generate data for over 500 Commons partnership categories.
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
No
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
We can check edits and categories to quantify the outputs.
Financial proposal[edit]
- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
5000 USD
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
5000 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback[edit]
Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).