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Interview with Sage Ross by Iolanda Pensa and Chiara Somajni, 11 November 2025, CC BY 4.0.

Sage Ross is the Chief Technology Officer of Wiki Education Foundation (a project's partner) and a member of the research team. He has a background in history of science. Sage has been contributing to Wikimedia project since 2005. He has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation for the pilot of the education programme. At Wiki Edu he is responsible for developing technology for Wikipedia classroom assignments, developing dashboards technology and Wiki courses modules.

Notes from the interview

(Notes to be edited)

Sage Ross is CTO of Wiki Education Foundation (project's partner institution)

Activity at Wiki Education

  • dashboard to keep track of the courses working with the WikiEdu programme
    • primarily higher education classes in the US and Canada
    • also teaching wikipedia e wikidata for knowledge work professionals (librarians, scientists...)
  • programme and events dashboard (based on the same code) used by the global wikimedia community for other courses, edit-a-thons, contests etc. where tracking of a specific set of users is needed
  • adding features for 15 years 
  • increasingly: bigger pictures stories, progamme's long term impact  

Impact visualisier

  • Looking at topics
    • The first challenge was clustering topics: machine learning did not work, you need to provide a set of articles as input, Wikipedia infrastructure helps a bit

provide a set of articles as sort of the input, as opposed to a system that could help you pull that set of articles out of Wikipedia, although we have some tools that kind of hook in with the rest of Wikimedia infrastructure that can do that in some cases.

    • The second challlenge was to visualise that data
  • Identifying the contributions of a group of user to a topic
  • Data story telling
  • Two-year project and found the resources to produce the tool. * Also higlighting the impact of funders on specific topics (identify when an initiative starts, impact...).
  • We did some story-telling but people are not putting it central to their work.
  • There is a good overlap between our projects.
  • We are now working with an internal on the development

Programs

  1. Wikipedia students programme: targets instructors to include Wikipedia in their assignments.
  2. Scholars and scientists program. They teach courses or visiting instructors. Other customized courses. Empowering people that work with data.

Dashboards

  1.  Wiki Education Dashboard for the programme Wiki Education is running. For their programmes there are rules, standards, emails. Specific for their programmes. Separate server. It runs on the same code. Also a reason of branding and full control on their own tool
  2. Events Dashboard created becasuse relevant for other people. They had support also form tech of WMF. 

For Visualizing Impact the idea is to develop two versions. But we will see which can be the best solution (maybe just one). The aim is for an external audience   At the beginning focus on the user. Sometimes it is relevant, but sometimes it is not. Set of user. At the moment i would like to make it more flexible Including set of users you care about.

To identify the contributions of a set of contributiors they used wikiwho by aggregating data (this tool associates texts to people).

[Iolanda] there are three kinds of contributors:

  • well-known topics
  •  a person who loves you (love the topic). you can identify it - difficult to notice- initiatives

is it possible to integrate the three groups? 

Languages Is increasing the number of langages a challenge? The possibility of increasing the languages is related to Wikiwho (how many languages supports). There is a need for some work. It could be possible to select the visualisations according to the available data. We can have more languages in 1 year.

Wikidata Making Wikidata central for the data story-telling is what Sage is more excited about (e.g. articles about NY neighbourhoods)  connecting  Wikidata and Wikipedia to identify holes  modelling holes making it easy enough for people to set up their own topic

To be included among the features: Number of statements of an item on Wikidata as a baseline could be useful for tracking wikidata development

Storytelling Example: https://impact-visualizer.wmcloud.org/topics/2

  • Among other things. you can see the changes made by participants and the ones made by other editors, and how initiatives foster furher activity
  • it can motivate action :)

Using the tool as a motivational tool. Measuring cascade

Closing Sage will share any new tool relevant to the project he might stumble upon.

At the moment we need to define the edges and limit and refine. Makiing it easy to use and produce data storytelling.

Producing something which is interesting and fun to dig deeper in that topic area. 

Suggested requirements

[edit]
  • number of statements of an item on Wikidata as a baseline could be useful for tracking wikidata development
  • Highlighting intense activity due to initiatives and measure cascade effect for motivation and funding

Knowledge gaps about climate change on Wikipedia

[edit]
  • Linking Wikidata and Wikipedia to support gaps identification
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