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Visual Analytics for Sustainability and Climate Change/Matthew Vetter

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Interview with Matthew Vetter by Iolanda Pensa and Chiara Somajni, 19 September 2025, CC BY 4.0.

Notes from the interview

desired structural completeness tools through Wiki Education

Background and Wikimedia Involvement Academic role and main activities

  • Matthew Vetter is Professor of Language, Literature and Writing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
  • He is an open knowledge advocate and a long-term Wikipedia educator.
  • He has been using Wikipedia as a teaching tool since 2011.
  • He has integrated Wikipedia assignments into approximately 30 undergraduate and graduate courses.

Wikimedia community involvement

  • Co-chair of WikiProject Writing, an initiative aimed at improving Wikipedia coverage of writing studies,

literacy, composition, rhetoric

  • He also initiated the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative, which aims to improve disciplinary content and train academics to become more knowledgeable contributors to Wikipedia

Institutional roles

  • Served for four years on the North American Regional Grants Committee.
  • Recently joined the Global Resource Distribution Committee, which develops policies on resource allocation, supports Wikimedia affiliates and organizations

Wikimedia platforms used

  • Matthew works primarily on English Wikipedia, Meta, Wikimedia Commons
  • Limited activity on Wikidata, other Wikimedia projects

Criteria for Assessing Wikipedia Article Quality

  • article class rating
  • page information
  • number of contributors
  • article history
  • periods of stagnant growth
  • number of page visitors
  • talk page activity

Particular attention is given to:

  • articles that have stopped developing
  • lack of sufficient media or secondary source coverage

Desired tools

  • Matthew has used structural completeness tools through Wiki Education dashboard and would like direct access to structural completeness scores from article pages or as links integrated into page information

Working with students Introductory undergraduate level

  • The main goal is not the final product but participation in the editing process, learning Wikipedia policies, understanding reliable sourcing.
  • He considers students successful if they contribute even 3–4 sentences that remain on Wikipedia

Advanced undergraduate courses

  • Typical expectations: adding 5–6 statements, including 3–4 reliable references, filling content gaps

He notes that students sometimes create high-quality new articles. However, these cases are exceptions

Graduate and doctoral level

  • Expectations include improving topics related to students’ own research, working with more scholarly sources
  • Expected outcomes: adding a new section, writing 2–3 substantial paragraphs, addressing broader article issues (e.g., revising articles written like personal essays, improving neutrality and style)

Pedagogical philosophy

  • He does not expect students to complete or perfect articles, move articles to a higher quality class
  • instead, emphasis on engagement, learning Wikipedia processes and policies, gradual participation

WikiProject Writing

  • Within WikiProject Writing they identify articles relevant to writing studies, assign quality ratings, assign priority levels
  • Criteria include disciplinary importance, article traffic
  • They have experimented with Wikidata queries to identify important figures, people in the field, missing disciplinary topics

Research focus

Key critiques:

  • Wikipedia emerged from a strongly masculinist culture, dominant forms of logic and language privilege certain perspectives
  • Wikipedia privileges print-based culture, Western forms of knowledge production
  • Possible consequences: exclusion of oral knowledge, folk knowledge, non-Western traditions
  • He considers it important to study what kinds of sources dominate articles

the epistemologies underlying Wikipedia

  • He highlights initiatives exploring oral citation epistemologies

Wikimedia Research Involvement

  • co-chair of Wiki Workshop 2025
  • Wikipedia research is heavily dominated by computer science, human-computer interaction
  • He would like greater participation from humanities scholars

more critical and humanistic approaches

Multilingualism

  • Currently works almost exclusively in English
  • However, teaches multilingual students
  • encourages students to contribute across languages

Visualization tools: Wiki Education Impact Visualizer Useful for:

  • tracking student impact
  • monitoring contributions over time
  • instructor profile dashboard

Matthew particularly values it because it:

  • aggregates contributions over time
  • tracks courses and students

He participated in developing a customised dashboard through the Wikimedia Research Fund that offers a program & events dashboard. Main limitation: restricted time span.

Feedback on the Visualization Prototypes

  • Exciting, impressive, highly promising
  • He sees value for his educational activities with graduates and WikiProject Writing

Wikidata

  • enormous potential
  • substantial technical complexity
  • individuals, smaller/less skilled groups would need help in getting their topic on Wikidata and exporting data

Interlink visualization

  • Matthew describes article development as a kind of rhizomatic growth or a growing plant structure.

Visualising article connections can:

  • reveal knowledge structures and their growth
  • reflects article development
  • provide motivation and satisfaction for contributors
  • orphan articles often indicate abandonment and can be used as indicators


Closing remarks and future interest

  • Matthew expressed strong enthusiasm for the project
  • offered availability for future testing
  • identified himself as part of the intended user group
  • described the tool development as “amazing work” and “important work”

Shared links

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=u_UKDHgAAAAJ

Suggested requirements

[edit]
  • Explore sources, oral citations: they highlight the underlying epistemology of the project
  • contact wikiprojects!!
  • provide support in getting topics on Wikidata and exporting data (individuals, smaller organizations will have difficulties)
  • consider introducing structural completeness scores (e.g. number of sections); WikiEdu's tool could be integrated
  • analyse interlinks (like in the Wikipedia primary school project
  • use orphans to identify stubs, abandoned articles
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