Some Basic (but great) Wikipedia Skills
First installment on things that every experienced Wikipedian knows, but I did not.
Here a few things that I learned at the Central and Eastern Europe Wikimedia Meeting in Tbilisi this week. Much of this will be entirely obvious to long-term Wikipedians -- but as it turns out, there are few academics/scholars that are familiar with the great ways in which Wikipedia can be used for scholarly purposes. (Overall, ambivalence and caution seem to prevail.) Here three useful things to start with.
Userviews — Reach of Articles
You can check on a single page how often pages you created have been viewed. I have a total of 180.000 views across my different entries -- this is not huge, by most standards, but arguably shows that this is an area of major impact on people's knowledge.
(One entry there is indeed to my great-great grandfather, a prolific lawyer and judge. My favourite entry is to the great Odette Keun.) I also started some entries on political prisoners in Azerbaijan, to ensure that accurate information is available about them.
In some cases, even if only a few hundred people looked at a page, like the Writer's House of Georgia, it can be worth creating it also. Appeal is only one of several vectors.
You can use Userviews this for anyone whose username you have. It turns out, for example, that the same Username created the entries for several politicians of the ruling party. A closer look at this user, however, shows that they have created more than 1500 (!) entries, with a total of 36 million views. He’s a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi of knowledge and not from the Dark Side. Here just a small glimpse from their record.
So, this is a fantastico tool to get a sense of what users do and how far it reaches. There are risks. As one Wikipedia pro also told us this weekend “with great power comes great responsibility.” Obviously, this should absolutely not be used to hound users. (With a few clicks, I did indeed find a likely Sith Lord with this tool also.)
I will make an effort to convince universities to enter such contributions also in their evaluation of academic work in the future — and Userviews is a simple way of measuring them. The link to UserViews is here.
Petscan — Checking Categories
In a single page you can search an entire category, such as
"Memorials_to_victims_of_communism"
and see when the articles were last updated -- and how big they are.
This can help you identify articles to work on and improve.
One practical application, could be to check “Monuments and memorials in Tbilisi”, and you will see merely nine entries. Most likely, the categories could be brought into a better order and shape, and attached to some monuments that are not yet listed.
We do see that most articles have been worked on in the last two years. Some articles are a bit slim. So if we want to identify places to improve, this is a good start.
Wikivoyage — this exists?!?
Among others: Wikivoyage is actually quite a good resource for people who want to get an overview on getting to new places, what to do, and how to get around:
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Tbilisi
It's not perfect, of course, but free, and maybe a good first stop to check if you do not want to rely on commercial guides. (If you find anything wrong, you can contribute to fixing it, too. I added some info on cycling just today.)
More to Follow
One experienced Wikipedian at the conference mentioned "oh, and then someone might apply for some activity who only has 500 edits, and of course this is totally not enough experience." It was said in a friendly tone, but with my skimpy 530 or so edits I still felt like a stowaway about to be found out!
So these are beginner skills -- but if I didn't know them, maybe they are of interest to some others also. It’s a gift to be learning.
#Wikipedia #data