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Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Evelin Heidel

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Interview with Evelin Heidel by Iolanda Pensa and Chiara Somajni, 24 November 2025, CC BY 4.0.

Evelin Heidel a.k.a. Scann is the program director of Wikimedistas de Uruguay (a project's partner organisation). A coordinator and strategist of open communities, she holds a BA in Literature from the University of Buenos Aires, was a Harvard Library Innovation Lab Summer Fellow in 2018 and an International Visiting Scholar at the American University, Washington College of Law in 2019. As a professional specialised in open access to knowledge she worked for Creative Commons particularly on cultural heritage (2018-2022); today, she is committed to advance open culture on climate change, information integrity and human rights through campaigns, conferences and research projects, some of which are supported by the UN and UNESCO.


Notes from the interview

notes to be edited

Links:
Wikimania 2026 Pre-Conference on Information Integrity on Climate Change: strategic coalition building with Wikimedia communities

Gaps

Articles related to the fossil fuel industry. These are currently missing because they are included in the Wikiproject Energy, not Wikiproject Climate Change Extreme weather events Climate policies, finance Stakeholders, policy makers.

Activity

Part of the working group on Climate justice and Wikimedia projects dedicated to foster various initiatives on climate change, sustainability and environmental topics on Wikimedia Projects with a focus on Latin America, together with Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Perù. Project with Brazil supported by UNESCO on information integrity on extreme weather events on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Conducting research funded by Climate action against disinformation on fossile fuel industries on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Co-organising the soon to be renamed Wiki for Human Rights Campaign focusing on climate change and environmental issues. Organization of a pre-conference day on information integrity on climate change at Wikimania Nairobi, a similar initiative is planned for Wikimania Paris 2026. Wikimedistas de Uruguay works on this together with other organizations from Latin American and African organizations related to the Wiki for Human Rights campaign. On the Climate Justice Working Group The working group on climate justice was established to work regionally. In 2023 it organised a meeting with the organisers of the Wiki for Human rights campaign in Latin America. Geographical proximity and cultural identity were the reasons that motivated to focus regionally - languages did not play necessarily a role. The group works in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The research on fossil fuel industries is also carried out in these languages.

The UN information integrity focus as an opportunity The fact that the UN is focussing on information integrity is an opportunity to take advantage of (the Wikimedia pre-conference used the same term). In 2024 the UN launched the global principles for information integrity. These are broader than climate change but the climate community found an interesting space to do some political action around the idea of information integrity. Adopting the same language helps establish collaborations between the UN, governments and the Wikimedia projects, showing that we are part of the solution. It is a useful framework.

Unesco project - funding, rationale, planned activity The project supported by Unesco is financially supported by the Global Initiative for Information Integrity in Climate Change, spearheaded by the government of Brasil, the UN Secretariat and Unesco. It's main focus is on extreme weather events. It is a relevant topic because it requires a rapid response from government and institutions. It is something wikipedians thrive on: they act and create new articles quickly. We want to provide more information and guidance on how to write them, how to identify relevant scientific knowledge or disinformation. These events tend to be riddled with disinformation, particularly around (as has been already identified and studied): quality of public intervention, casualties, impact, consequences and causes - climate change as often downplayed as a (contributing) cause.

Another objective is to bring some clarity into the strategies that some of the actors are using, as they tend to use the same over and over. E.g., those who work on monitoring and debunking often write a report published as a pdf and it is difficult to navigate in this kind of information; in the long run in turns out that the arguments used are always the same: these are things that could be captured on Wikidata.

Programmed actions:

Identifying what an extreme weather event is on Wikidata. Definitions of what an extreme weather event is are available but this is not necessarily modelled adequately in Wikidata. So, ensuring that the model is correct and responds properly is a priority (e.g., a flooding can be, but is not necessarily, an extreme weather event). Clarifying the nature of the event that we are looking at would be the first step.

Based on that, ensure correctness of Wikipedia categories and analyse trends. Analyse articles on Wikipedia, to check they do not contain disinformation etc. Another project about Fossil fuel industry. Supported by Climate action against disinformation (https://caad.info/). There are some curious things happening. the top cited reference in Wikipedia in english is oil and gas journal (is a corporate journal). Identifying if the leading section includes climate change and if there is a connection about the article and climate change.

List of articles we have for the project VIZ. we need to include:

Fossil fuel industry. It is not included in our model because it will not be included in the project climate change but energy. Extreme weather events. it is difficult to put them in climate change. at the moment they are not in the wikiproject. Some articles are not in the Wikiproject climate change and we need to make sure to include also topics that are not in the project. The question should be "is it useful for the visualisation". maybe interesting for the trends.

One of the challenge of the visualisation is that we need to have a interdisciplinary approach. Cristian Scapozza has a specific attention to paleoclimatologist. For me is more important to look at policies: where things starts. considering communities I created the Wikiproject climate change in Spanish. we do a lot of things together. If we do technical improvement we do it together. With African communities i don't know how much attention they pay. List of articles. Difference. We have a huge translation list. We made sure to add a large series of articles. At the beginning we did an extensive work. Now we add few articles. Around 1000 articles. There are some things which are specific like biographies. Including portuguese in the project. Campaign Wiki for Human rights campaign. Now from 2026 there will be a campaign specific on climate change. It separates from human rights. We don't want the capaign to die. The foundation approach us in 2024 and we want the campaign continuing. Initially there were a lot of resources in this. This topic brings together a lot of people. it is important in many countires and it allows also to create partnerships.In many countries there is not a lot of information about climate change. We don't want to loose this momentum and take advantage of it. We have important partners, interest, resources. Such as the UN. We do not plan to orientate the focus on specific topics/articles. Our role is not explain what is climate change. We want to empower people in contributing to articles. Wikimedians can facilitating to activate academia and journalists. But is not our role to explain what it is. We need to clarify who is doing what. UN and FAO can do some of the work. For this reason is so important the collaboration with different partners. In Latin America the topic of climate change is present in the news. There is a lot of disinformation for example in Brasil and Argentina. For example in the appruval of the document in Perù for access to information there were reactions related to religious reasons opposing the document.

How was the list of articles created. We did it in 2021. I had a contract with XX and they published a guide on how to contribute to climate change on Wikipedia. We looked at the English list and adding content.

Visualising tool. Relevance: - Important representing the impact for people who do not understand why engaging with Wikipedia. - Allowing to see some more structural issues. when we did the Osservatorio scuola it allows to do two things: focusing on content and representing it. It allows to understand the data in the background. I am worried what we will not use it that much.- organiser only use a list. use it for templates. they need a working list. the tool can solve some issues. [Iolanda says the tools seems to be appreciated the most by people curating a wikiproject, and institutions. Could be useful for grant seeking and reporting: we could test it Maybe using the tool - to report on the UNESCO project- Or using the tool to convince funders. Often funders don't really know about Wikipedia. Showing them pageviews might not be the best message. But they are very interested in understanding how wikipedians are feeding artificial intelligence. but difficult in the relationship with volunteers. Grantmakers are not particularly interested in metrics. In 2021 maybe i would have give you a different answer.But now For me is a personal reason. It is the most important topic of this time. This is for real. We see it everywhere. 2050. it is in 25 years. it is nothing. when you start putting the numbers, the thing is very closed. it is going to happen now. and it will change the way society works. Providing people with the right information is useful. there is a lot of information that makes people doubting. fossil fuels is everywhere. understanding how we will translate from fossil fuels is not obvious. we can provide neutral and unbiased information. Information does not produce directly action but at least it provides people the background.

we could test using the tools in reporting with Climate action against disinformation kpi these institutions are working with are different, eg how many articles

Gaps

[edit]
  • Articles related to the fossil fuel industry.
  • Articles included in other Wikiprojects but not in Wikiproject Climate Change (this is the case with articles related to the fossil fuel industry, currently missing because they are included in the Wikiproject Energy)
  • Extreme weather events
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