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Research:Developing a wiki-integrated workflow to build a living review on just sustainability transitions

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Created
09:22, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
Collaborators
Romain Mekarni, Rémy Gerbet , Arthur Perret, Finn Årup Nielsen, Dariusz Jemielniak, Amélie E. Pereira
Duration:  2025-09 – 2027-03
Grant ID: G-RS-2504-18935

This page documents a planned research project.
Information may be incomplete and change before the project starts.


Upcoming project events:

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- 9-10 July (Paris, french) : Presentation at MeSSH (Méthodes pour les sciences sociales et les humanités  - Methods for social sciences and humanities)

- 21-22 Juillet (Paris, english and french) Hackathon Wikimania

- 1er et 15 september (online, english) LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group

- 1er december (online, french) Wikicafé : De la réponse à un appel à projet de la Fondation Wikimédia à la publication des résultats : retour d'expérience du projet d'utilisation de Wikidata pour faire une revue de littérature par Adélie Ranville https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Wikifier_la_science/WikiCaf%C3%A9s

Summary

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This research proposal focuses on developing a living literature review on just sustainability transitions, addressing the challenges of information overload, knowledge synthesis and dissemination in academic research. We aim to assess the potential of Wikidata for creating an enriched, searchable academic knowledge graph on just sustainability transitions in order to facilitate navigation of existing academic knowledge and synthesis of research findings. To do so, we will conduct a meta-review of existing literature reviews, aiming to synthesize their findings by making the data they include interoperable and compatible with linked open data standards. Utilizing Wikidata, the project will collect and enrich bibliographic data, extract research results, and build a knowledge graph. The final output will include a literature review academic paper linked to this knowledge graph and a technical report about the challenges encountered in our literature review workflow. The project aligns with Wikimedia's strategic goals by contributing to filling content gaps on an important topic and by proposing an innovative way to build and disseminate social sciences results that could improve expert contribution to Wikimedia project and content trustworthiness.

Adressed Wikimedia Foundation Goals :

Methods

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Our study will rely on a meta-review, that is a review of existing literature reviews. Data presented in literature reviews are usually presented as tables or diagrams, and sometimes provided as supplementary materials in publications. However, these data are not made interoperable and are not used to update prior literature reviews. Our goal will be to synthesize results of previous literature reviews by making their findings compatible with linked open data and open science standards using Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wikipedia and other open-science infrastructures. We will collect and enrich bibliographic data, extract research result data to build a knowledge graph, propose relevant visualization of this graph and write a literature review report linked with our knowledge graph, making scientific writing compatible with the linked open data ideal.


Timeline

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Our project is organized in 3 work packages each including precise deliverables (D) or event participation (E).

WP1: Conducting a living meta review on just sustainability transition using Wikimedia projects

  • D1.1: An academic Wikidata graph on just sustainability transition supported by academic references and relevant SPARQL queries to navigate the graph.
  • D1.2: An academic paper presenting a meta-literature review of existing reviews on just sustainability transition including our detailed methodology.

WP2: Data engineering and user workflow assessment

  • D2.1: Technical documentation of the method workflow, identifying existing, missing or incomplete tools (ex : Zotero-Wikidata synchronisation)
  • D2.2: Small developments addressing workflow gaps (ex : zotero script, open refine data model, new wikidata properties, Wikidata Schema, export/import between mediawiki and word document…)

WP3: Dissemination and community building

Audience 1: Social science researchers

  • E.1: Academic conference presentation at a social science conference (ex: RC33 International Conference on Social Science Methodology, Knowledge Graphs for Sustainability Workshop – KG4S) to share our new living review workflow.
  • E.2: Wikidata & Wikipedia Editathon on sustainability research

Audience 2: Wikimedia researchers

  • E.3: Presentation within the wikimedia community (ex: Wiki Workshop, Wikimania)
  • D3.1: Updated project page on meta.wiki
  • D3.2: Research grant application targeting open science infrastructure funds (OSCARS Open Calls, The navigation fund, Fond national pour la science ouverte, PEPR eNSEMBLE : « Collaboration Numérique »).

Audience 3: Wikimedia community

  • E.4: Presentation at a french-speaking Wikimedia community event (ex : Wikifranca Wikiconvention Francophone)
Timeline
Task Month
D1.1 : Building wikidata graph (data collection) 1-3
D1.1 : Building wikidata graph (data analysis) 4-7
D1.1 : Building wikidata graph (data viz) 6-9
D1.2 : Writing academic paper 9-12
D2.1 : Writing technical documentation 1, 3, 8, 12
D2.2 : Technical developments 1, 3, 8
D3.1 : Updated Meta.wiki page 3, 4, 9, 12
D3.2 : Grant(s) application writing 2-3
E1-4 : Dissemination events 4, 10

Policy, Ethics and Human Subjects Research

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TBD

Results

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Other community engagement activities : - Wikidata ontology course project : www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Bass.Ham/Wikidata-for-Sustainability Other dissemination opportunities : - Post on https://forrt.org/resources/

Technical Documentation

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During the construction of the graph, the main difficulty encountered was the numerous bugs in the open-source tools used. For example, the "Author Disambiguator" tool, used to create entries for the researchers who worked on the publications we are analysing, fails to launch about half the time, displaying the message "too many requests"

The Orcidator tool, which, as its name suggests, automatically adds ORCIDs to researchers’ profiles, could not be used. The message "DEACTIVATED BECAUSE OF ABUSE" appears after logging[1].


Wikidata account configuration

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Several tools are useful to reproduce the method developped in this project (they can be activated in user settings : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Preferences)

  • Merge
  • CiteTool
  • Duplicate references
  • Move
  • Move claim
  • currentDate (to use when using a wikidata item as reference)

Importing publications in Wikidata

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Best tools :

Less recommanded :

Existing documentation :

Citing a wikidata item in a wiki page

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  • There is a template to cite Wikidata scholarly items https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Cite_Q
  • There is a template to link toward Wikidata items : https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Wikidata_entity_link
  • It would be interesting to be able to cite concepts as well (for exemple calling values for: Label, Description, Coined by...)
  • It would be interesting to generate a "cite work" Wikidata statement on the item of the Wikipage each time a "Cite Q" template is used. It would allow to visualise the items cited in a Wiki page more easily. (Problem: it will not work to differentiate references listed in various linguistic versions of the same page)
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We used the following properties to enrich data related to scientific publications:

study type P8363 and data analysis method P13391

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main subject P921

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A tool exist to semi-automatize the addition of topics for scientific items (Item Subjector https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/ItemSubjector), however its use is too technical for people without technical knowledge.

research site P6153

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The property "research site" showed constraints issue as it was created to indicate clinical trial sites but used in practice for the larger purpose of the research site or fieldwork. A discussion is ongoing (2026) to solve this : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P6153 (Constraints alerts can be ignored in the meantime.)

cites work (P2860)

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Authors

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We used the Author Disambiguator tool to create Wikidata items for researchers who did not yet have one. This tool helps to minimise errors caused by homonyms among researchers: following a query, it categorises scientific publications into thematic groups. It also automatically searches for ORCID, ResearchGate and VIAF pages[1].

The "Author Disambiguator" tool, used to create entries for the researchers who worked on the publications we are analysing, fails to launch about half the time, displaying the message "too many requests".

Other bug : "Error retrieving token: mwoauthdatastore-request-token-not-found"

Author disambiguator sometimes failed to retrieve the publications : SPARQL query 'SELECT ?q ?qLabel WHERE { VALUES ?q { } . SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language '[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en,de,es,fr,nl,mul'. } }' failed on endpoint 'https://query.wikidata.org/sparql' after 0 retries. Last HTTP response HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error

The Orcidator tool, which, as its name suggests, automatically adds ORCIDs to researchers’ profiles, could not be used. The message "DEACTIVATED BECAUSE OF ABUSE" appears after logging (https://sourcemd.toolforge.org/orcidator_old.php, tested on 7 April 2026).

OpenAlex ID

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  • We used OpenRefine to automatically add the unique OpenAlex identifier using the OpenCitations API.

Sourcing statements

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  • Infferred from, etc.

Extracting data from an article

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Bibliographic tables

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Some review articles contain tables about specific studies. These tables are hard to reuse when they are on a PDF (the table formatting is lost when we try to copy it). However, it is possible to copy a table from the online version of an article and paste it in an excel sheet.

Visualising bibliographic data from Wikidata

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Visualizing bibliographic tables with enriched meta-data

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  • We tried SPARQL requests to visualise tables of bibliographic items with the data we added (main topic, study type, research site), these requests did not work because of the Graph split and a python program was necessary to visualize the table (for example : https://github.com/Ronnie-V/ReadSubjects)
  • It is possible to visualize data by adding columns of reconciled data in Openrefine : [to develop]
  • Tabernacle seem to be the most user-friendly tool to visualise tables : https://tabernacle.toolforge.org (Example). The direct results on this page are editable by simple click and thus not suitable for purely sharing results since accidental edit can easily occur. It can be use for contributing quickly but lacks the possibility to add references. It seem to be a great tool for label translation.

Visualising topics

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Visualizing timelines

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Visualising connexions between two concepts

  • The "metaphact" pathfinder tool could be interesting to visualise a relation between concepts but many properties seem omitted in the existing tool.https://wikidata.metaphacts.com

Visualising specific properties

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  • Wikidata graph builder seem to be the most user friendly, robust and versatile tool to visualise a graph of a single property https://angryloki.github.io Other tools are bugged or limited to specific properties.

Writing in mediawiki

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  • The visual editor is not available by default and has to be enabled in the user preferences. It would help new users to have it enabled by default.

Abstract Wikipedia

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Word to Media Wiki integration

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The problem : Academics without technical background often write using word and zotero, which allows to manage the references while we write and generate a reference list (see example attached). If we copy-paste this kind of text using Wikipedia visual editor, the text formatting is kept but the references data are lost: all (author, date) mentions have to be manually changed to a reference, for example by generating the reference from the DOI of each cited paper. This is quite consuming and as a result i have seen wikipedia pages in which the contributors did not change the references formatting, kept (author, date) mentions and copy-pasted their reference list at the end of the page.

The goal : it would be great to have a seamless integration when we copy-paste a text having zotero references in it in the visual editor, or to have a converter to change word+zotero reference formatting into wiki reference formatting.

Existing discussion : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:WordToWiki

Impact analysis

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Resources

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Just sustainability networks & projects

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Publications

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References

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  1. ↑ https://sourcemd.toolforge.org/orcidator_old.php, tested on 7 April 2026
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