Jump to content

Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Florian Maximilian Meier

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
VIZWP Project Activities Community Articles Requirements Tool DMP Report Credits

Interview with Florian Maximilian Meier by Chiara Somajni and Iolanda Pensa, 3 June 2025, CC BY 4.0.

Florian Maximilian Meier contributes to the project with his expertise in climate change, the Wikimedia projects and data analysis. He is an associate professor of quantitative user experience and information behaviour at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a doctorate from Regensburg University in Germany. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, digital humanities, and interactive information retrieval and behaviour, with a thematic focus on climate change communication. He is also the author of the study Using Wikipedia Pageview Data to Investigate Public Interest in Climate Change at a Global Scale (Meier, 2024).

Notes from the interview

Dataset about climate change – Full record of Florian Meier's paper: Florian Meier. 2024. Using Wikipedia Pageview Data to Investigate Public Interest in Climate Change at a Global Scale. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference (WEBSCI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 365–375. https://doi.org/10.1145/3614419.3644007
The dataset used for his paper is openly accessible and linguistically agnostic.

Wikipedia and Wikidata – Meier's work at the university focuses on climate change communication and climate change information behaviour. Wikipedia has been used as a proxy for public interest on climate change. Wikipedia works well in this. The categorisation is fluid.

Meier used climate change, but there are other ways to categorise the same articles. Their number constantly grows. Sometimes the list of articles is questionable.

Wikidata offers more structured interactions. The link between Wikipedia and Wikidata allows specific interactions.

Users' motivation – For example, articles related to Greta Thunberg: are people interested in her or climate change? Why are these people interested in this page? Where do people come from? What is driving their activities? And where are they going next?

One hypothesis is that people don't look much for information about climate change. People know about it in Europe. But the problem is acting on climate change. We don't do anything about it.

Wikipedia provides information about climate change, not how to act on it. This isn't necessarily the role of Wikipedia. How much can Wikipedia cover this?

Gaps – Meier didn't notice content gaps, nor did he look at the size of articles: his focus was on the visits. He noticed gaps between language editions.

Where do people experience those gaps? When do people experience gaps? From where? Investigate the gaps. Also, investigate behaviours in different parts of the world. How the tool is used.

Kind of data the tool should include – The quality of the article was not an issue. I was interested in the views. Engagement is also editing (editors' wars, engagement in specific periods...).

Connecting events to content? Where do we see an interest?

Changes in articles. A tool to see how people make edits. You can trace edits.

Collective climate action. How can you drive collective climate action?

Languages – I don't know where Abstract wikipedia is. Generating articles without editors. Fill linguistic gaps by generating articles from Wikidata.

Having an article in all languages.

The tool could facilitate the identification of the articles to translate with Abstract Wikipedia.

Sometimes the title on Wikipedia can be different from the title on Wikidata.

AI – The community is very sensitive.

Tools – How an article improved: attention! An article can be improved also by removing content. Provide more info about the triangles.

Images are not necessarily useful.

Relevance of Wikipedia – Wikipedia is the last good place we still have.

Comparing articles with other sources – A relevant effort. But if the tool is agnostic, maybe an effort which only applys to climate change and not to other topics.

It would be useful to track how companies are reducing emissions: a repository of reports, with a session on Wikipedia for the companies.

Suggested requirements

[edit]
  • Why is this person interested in this page? Where do people come from? What is driving their actions (e.g. event in public life)?
  • And where are they going next?
  • Understanding engagement (reactions, editing...).
  • Iolanda adds: Connecting events to content?
  • If and how an article has been improved; clarify what improvement means, considering it may include removing content (provide more info about the triangles).
  • Images are not necessarily useful
  • More information about how to read the visualisation. A tutorial or some examples. Improving the description and providing details.

Knowledge gaps about climate change on Wikipedia

[edit]
  • Link knowledge about climate change to knowledge/information on how to act.
  • How companies are reducing emissions. Repository of reports adding a session on Wikipedia for the companies.
  • How and when do people experience gaps?
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Visual_Analytics_for_Sustainability_and_Climate_Change/Florian_Maximilian_Meier&oldid=30852191"