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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Research Fund/Dashboards to understand the organization of social memory about Chileans in Wikipedia. Politicians, scientists, artists, and sportspersons since the 19th century

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statusFunded
Dashboards to understand the organization of social memory about Chileans in Wikipedia. Politicians, scientists, artists, and sportspersons since the 19th century.
Grant IDG-RS-2303-12062
start and end datesJuly 2023 - July 2024
budget (USD)36,000.00 USD
fiscal year2022-23
applicant(s)• Pablo Beytía and Carlos Cruz Infante

Overview

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Applicant(s)

Pablo Beytía and Carlos Cruz Infante

Affiliation or grant type

Monitor Social; Catholic University of Chile; The German Internet Institute; Università di Roma La Sapienza

Author(s)

Pablo Beytía and Carlos Cruz Infante

Wikimedia username(s)

Project title

Dashboards to understand the organization of social memory about Chileans in Wikipedia. Politicians, scientists, artists, and sportspersons since the 19th century.

Research proposal

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Description

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Description of the proposed project, including aims and approach. Be sure to clearly state the problem, why it is important, why previous approaches (if any) have been insufficient, and your methods to address it.

We aim to create dashboards to analyze the social memory compiled in Wikipedia biographies of notable Chileans. That could 1) encourage the use of Wikipedia knowledge to understand Chile's past and 2) facilitate Wikipedians to identify relevant content disparities across biographies (in areas such as gender, place of birth, occupation, and institutional affiliations).

We will create separate dashboards for three occupational biographies domains: scientists, artists, and sportspersons. The user could choose variables to focus their analysis and observe patterns in the biographies' composition. We will complement the project with a dashboard about the Chilean politicians (https://www.monitorsocial.cl/politicos) that we published with (non-monetary) support from Wikimedia Chile.

We will make a research report on the structure of the social memory about Chileans on Wikipedia and an open-access academic publication on content biases across occupational fields. We will evaluate content imbalances and attend to the relevant content disparities. We will also address the evolution of those variables according to the birth period of the notable people.

This project considers five stages:

Data extraction: we create databases of people with Chilean nationality and classify them within more specific occupations using Wikidata. We extract essential biographical information and variables that allow us to rank the biographies or add functionalities to the dashboards.

Preprocessing: we check the data for correctness. We manually complete the database if any relevant data is missing and available in Wikipedia.

Natural language processing (NLP): we perform NLP on the Spanish biographies to recognize relevant discursive entities (people, events, places, dates, organizations).

Visualization: our dashboards interactively show the information, following the user's interests. To create visualizations, we combine software: Tableau, Data Studio, Power B.I., and Fluorish.

Research reports: we produce a descriptive report on the organization of social memory about Chileans in science, art, politics, and sports. In addition, we write an open-access scientific publication concerning the content biases for each occupational dimension.

We have already piloted a dashboard on Chilean politicians (https://www.monitorsocial.cl/politicos) and published a study applying NLP to Wikipedia biographies (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304422X22001140).

Personnel

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  • The applicants are directors of Monitor Social (https://www.monitorsocial.cl), an initiative focused on creating artificial intelligence dashboards to analyze socially relevant issues. Monitor Social has experience monitoring contingent processes (elections and referendums) and permanent concerns (such as the emergence of conflicts or ecological risks) in Chile. World Summit Awards recently awarded this initiative as the best global digital innovation in Government & Citizen Engagement (https://wsa-global.org/winner/monitor-social/).
  • Our team includes academics, students, and non-remunerated advisors of Wikimedia-Chile:
  • Camila Rojas, data engineer, Monitor Social / Catholic University of Chile, Chile.
  • Carla Toro, volunteer advisor, Wikimedia Chile.

Budget

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Approximate amount requested in USD.

36,000.00 USD

Budget Description

Briefly describe what you expect to spend money on (specific budgets and details are not necessary at this time).

Our budget primarily considers the work of a group of researchers who will create these digital tools on a website, disseminate them widely and prepare open access scientific reports:

● Salary or stipend: $22.000

● Benefits: $0

● Equipment: $0

● Software: $2.000

● Open access publishing costs: $2.000

● Institutional overhead: $5.000

● Communications and advertising: $5.000

Impact

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Address the impact and relevance to the Wikimedia projects, including the degree to which the research will address the 2030 Wikimedia Strategic Direction and/or support the work of Wikimedia user groups, affiliates, and developer communities. If your work relates to knowledge gaps, please directly relate it to the knowledge gaps taxonomy.

This project connects with the 2030 Wikimedia Strategic Direction in multiple ways:

Knowledge as service:

1. Uses Wikidata's infrastructure to provide content that makes sense to a community and allows learning about it.

2. Encourages the use of Wikipedia knowledge to understand countries' history and memory.

3. Serves to the community of Wikipedians in Chile, highlighting those social groups that do not have sufficient information and could be targeted for editorial work.

Knowledge equity:

1. Contributes to clarifying the groups excluded from Chilean politics, sciences, arts, and sports.

Dissemination

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Plans for dissemination.

A Project Communication Manager will disseminate content in three main ways:

Our media:

  • Posts on our Website and Twitter account –around 10K followers.

Partnerships:

  • Joint dissemination with Wikimedia Chile (we could organize a launch).
  • Academic dissemination through our networks and their social media accounts.

Advertising:

  • Social media paid advertising for each dashboard's launch.

Past Contributions

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Prior contributions to related academic and/or research projects and/or the Wikimedia and free culture communities. If you do not have prior experience, please explain your planned contributions.

Pablo Beytía has been researching Wikipedia biographies and their content gaps for years as part of his doctoral thesis at the Humboldt University of Berlin and his lectureship in computational social science at the Catholic University of Chile. He participated as a speaker at the Wiki Workshop 2020 and as Program Committee at the Wiki Workshop 2021 and 2022.

He has published five scientific articles on how Wikipedia biographies are structured, including the following topics: 1) measurement of geographic bias in biographies, 2) indicators of written and visual gender bias in biographies, 3) how to use biographies to understand social gaps within the sciences, and 4) a theory of how content gaps emerge in the Wikipedia editorial workflow.


I agree to license the information I entered in this form excluding the pronouns, countries of residence, and email addresses under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. I understand that the decision to fund this Research Fund application, the application itself along with all the information entered by my in this form excluding the pronouns, country of residences, and email addresses of the personnel will be published on Wikimedia Foundation Funds pages on Meta-Wiki and will be made available to the public in perpetuity. To make the results of your research actionable and reusable by the Wikimedia volunteer communities, affiliates and Foundation, I agree that any output of my research will comply with the WMF Open Access Policy. I also confirm that I have read the privacy statement and agree to abide by the WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes