Uncovering Alternative Metrics: Data Mining Wikipedia for Evidence of Public Engagement and Impact
VALA2024 CONCURRENT Session 04
Tuesday 9th July 2024, 2.25-2.55pm
Peter Neish
- Program Manager, Stewardship and Open Research
- The University of Melbourne
Sally Tape
- Open Research Support Specialist
- The University of Melbourne
Lars Alvik
- Digital Curation Technical Specialist
- The University of Melbourne
Presentation
Abstract
As the world’s largest reference website, Wikipedia is one of the main ways knowledge is disseminated outside of traditional publications and news reporting. In this paper, we investigate how GLAM institutions have engaged and measured impact with Wikipedia and some of the tools used. We look at the structure of content in Wikipedia and ways of accessing data of various qualities and we
describe some preliminary coding experiments that test data mining in Wikipedia to examine how research is being cited and referenced in Wikipedia.
Biographies
Peter is the Program Manager, Stewardship and Open Research at the University of Melbourne. He works across the University on a range of data management projects. He has interests in data management training, planning and open science. Peter has previously worked in libraries, research organisations and government, using his background as a researcher and computer scientist to make data and information more open, standards-based and linked. He is currently Treasurer of Wikimedia Australia.
Sally Tape works as the Open Research Support Specialist at the University of Melbourne. Working across the University, she supports a range of programs, including advising researchers on the publication and sharing of digital materials and non-traditional research outputs. Sally has a keen interest in workflows, systems management and digitisation and is curre
ntly participating in a Python study group as part of the BitCurator Consortium and the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Lars works as a Digital Curation Technical Specialist at the University of Melbourne. Lars works mostly with the technical side of the University’s repositories Figshare and Preservica, often involving scripting and setting up workflows. Previously he’s been a Wikipedia Administrator for several years and a Wikipedian-in-Residence working with uploading images from GLAM institutions to Wikimedia Commons.
This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International.