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Test the updated visualization tool for articles related to sustainability and climate change.

Community space, to inform about the tool development, collect community needs and feedback, and test the tool implemented within the project Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change.

Context

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What is this project about

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Main article: Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change
The project was publicly presented at Wikimania 2025 in Kenya, during a very lively poster session, and raised lot’s of interest and curiosity. On the pict, Iolanda Pensa, principal instigator of the project and Florence Devouard. The original version of the poster may be found here

Visualizing Sustainability and Climate Change is a project aimed at identifying and visualizing knowledge gaps related to sustainability and climate change on Wikipedia. The project helps visualize these knowledge gaps, supports communities in improving content on this important topic, facilitates collaboration among multilingual communities and partners, and strengthens the capacity of Wikipedia contributors to document and share information on climate change (as well as sustainability and SDGs).

In practice, in collaboration with Wikimedia projects focused on sustainability and climate change, the initiative will produce a visual tool that allows users to evaluate and monitor the quality and quantity of articles related to sustainability and climate change on Wikipedia across different languages.
In the long run, the tool is expected to serve beyond the specific « Climate change » topic.

Who is involved

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Main article: Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Credits

The projet is developped as part of a research project, promoted by SUPSI, funded by the SNSF (grant number 10003183), with the patronage of Wikimedia Italia. On the Wiki Community side of things, the organizations involved are Wikimedistas de Uruguay, Wiki in Africa, and Wiki Education Foundation. And its community manager is Anthere

When does that take place

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Main article: Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Activities

The full research project will last 4 years. It launched in May 2025.

The main goals in 2025 are to

  • Establish the list of climate change related articles the project will work on
  • Collect needs and feedbacks for researchers and institutions active in the Wikimedia movement
  • Inform the community, host conversations, collect needs, compile feedback. In short... activities to make sure the tool will be useful for wikipedians
  • Setting up the specs of the tool (design etc.)
  • First implementation of the tool

The main goals in 2026 are to

  • The release of the first version and test phase early 2026
  • The release of the second version and test phase late 2026
  • Use and assessment of the visualisation tool
  • Presentation at Wikimania 2026
  • Presentation at FOSDEM 2026 and elsewhere
  • Collaborative analytics workshop end of the year

A final release is planned in 2027, or 2028.

How is the tool developed

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Starting points to consider

Interested

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If you are interested by the project, want to be kept informed, or want to provide some ideas, or want to be involved in the tool testing later on, please drop your username below. Possibly indicate your communicate language if English is too challenging for you

Community conversations

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2026

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  • ...

2025

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Presentation during the Wikiconvention francophone in Cotonou-Benin
  • Goal 1: Introduction to the project and thoughts on prototype
  • Goal 2: To discuss the first prototype visuals/pour discuter des premiers visuels du prototype
Past - Initial short presentations of VIZWP hosted


Please drop notes and comments here

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English, French super welcome. Spanish and Italian ok as well ;)

Comments from Flo

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Based on [1], how are « Instances » updated at the moment ? Is that fixed ? If fixed, how can new instances added to Wikidata be added to the vizualization system ?

The visualisations should not be based only on the English characteristics. There are lot's of "translanguage" information that could be interesting visually. For example... seeing the difference in size between French and English ? (if bigger in French... suggest translation from French to English is an option). Or seeing the differences in evaluation (if better assessment in French... might suggest the French article could inspire the English editors). Or huge pageviews in Spanish, but super low in French... what does that suggest ? Etc.

« Number of editors" and "number of revisions", which provides a measure of "interest" around the topic and likelyhood to progress", are very important elements to draw from as well.

It also VERY interesting to visualise the articles that were written a "long time ago", but basically have been left "to rot" since then. An important sign of possible "oudated content". But this would probably be harder to visually represent (maybe somethink such as xx % of the bytes added were added over 10 years ago might be an approach).

Comments from Nicole

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  • Some guidance in the clustering task will probably help: Can articles only belong to one cluster or none/multiple? How many clusters do you roughly aim for?
  • I think "instance" will be key in clustering. Just to keep in mind: It makes also sense to then feed back information into Wikidata (i.e. tag Wikidata objects with the correct instance if they currently have none) - this might make the work more reproducible in the future.
  • Some articles seem to be not missing in the visualisation - why is that? For example, if I select instance "climate change by country or territory (13)" only two articles are visualised (climate change in India and climate change in South Africa).
    • The answer is to change the minimum page views (by default at 100). But many entries exist, that are clearly not attached to the Wikidata instance Anthere (talk)
  • Very much agree with Florence: Something like number of revisions or average daily revisions would be an important measure - also to better understand whether these were constantly growing articles or articles that referred to current events/were written in a burst (and are now rotting).


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