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User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/ICEI 2018/Wikimedia projects and citizen science

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Wikimedia projects and citizen science

New species of cranefly in the genus Megistocera discovered on Wikimedia Commons
Logos of Wikimedia projects — i.e. projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation — all of which have some level of engagement with citizen science. Clockwise, starting on top: Wikimania, Wikibooks, Meta-Wiki, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, MediaWiki, Wikimedia Incubator, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia. Most of them exist in multiple languages (e.g. Wikipedia in ca. 300) — together, they form an ecosystem of about 1000 wikis, each with their own community.
Logos of Wikimedia projects — i.e. projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation — all of which have some level of engagement with citizen science. Clockwise, starting on top: Wikimania, Wikibooks, Meta-Wiki, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, MediaWiki, Wikimedia Incubator, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia. Most of them exist in multiple languages (e.g. Wikipedia in ca. 300) — together, they form an ecosystem of about 1000 wikis, each with their own community.
 Map of localities where frog species of the genus Paedophryne have been found.


Abstract[edit]

When searching the web for information on a given topic — say, citizen science — Wikipedia will often come up high in the search results. What is less known is that Wikipedia forms the nucleus of an entire ecosystem of Wikimedia projects that are roughly organized by information channel. Besides the encyclopedia, this includes an archive (Wikisource) and a dictionary (Wiktionary), along with sites dedicated to quotes (Wikiquote), taxa (Wikispecies), media files (Wikimedia Commons), books (Wikibooks), coursework (Wikiversity), news (Wikinews), structured data (Wikidata), software (MediaWiki) or technical infrastructure (Wikimedia Labs).

While citizen science-related topics form only a small sliver of the content found on these open knowledge platforms, the practice of contributing is similar to that of many citizen science projects: contributors are volunteers who participate in areas of their own interest, in a language of their choice and on their own timeline. The similarities go further, with community-driven collaborations forming around issues that are also in the focus of citizen science projects: the identification and disambiguation of taxa, people or locations, the collection and categorization of photographs, audiovisual materials and historic records, the transcription and translation of such records, the integration and visualization of data, or identifying and locating suitable resources that can help verify information related to any of the above.

This contribution is intended as a guided tour around such citizen science activities taking place in the framework of Wikimedia projects, both within and across domains of knowledge. Focusing on examples from biodiversity and ecosystems research, it will highlight some data-related issues (e.g. data and metadata quality, data integration) and how they are handled in Wikimedia contexts. The presentation will be given on the basis of https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/events/blob/master/ICEI2018-citizen-science.md , which now links to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/ECEI_2018 . Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops, as they will be invited to actively engage with Wikimedia-based information in their domain, as well as to entertain and share ideas on how they could integrate it with their own activities.

Overview of Wikimedia projects[edit]

  • Mission: "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally"
Logos of Wikimedia projects — i.e. projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation — all of which have some level of engagement with citizen science. Clockwise, starting on top: Wikimania, Wikibooks, Meta-Wiki, Wikiquote, Wikispecies, MediaWiki, Wikimedia Incubator, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia. Most of them exist in multiple languages (e.g. Wikipedia in ca. 300) — together, they form an ecosystem of about 1000 wikis, each with their own community.

Interactions between citizen science and Wikimedia projects[edit]

Wikimedia projects and their communities interact with citizen science in multiple ways

Providing information about citizen science, including on some specific projects or actors[edit]

List of Citizen science projects on the Italian Wikipedia
Screenshot of Field Notes of Junius Henderson Notebook 3 on the English Wikisource as of 2018-09-24

Collecting information about topics that are - or could be - the subject of citizen science projects[edit]

Scholia topic profile for invasive species (Q183368) - screenshot from 2018-09-24.
See also the talks
"Community-curated Linked Open Data about the Sustainable Development Goals, their targets and indicators" in Session S3.6 "Efficient data and workflow management for reaching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets associated to biodiversity and ecosystems" at 10:30 - 12:30 on Tuesday 25 September 2018 in Lecture Hall 5.
and
"Visualizing the research ecosystem of ecosystem research via Wikidata" in Session S1.6 "Semantics for biodiversity and ecosystem research" at 10:30 - 14:15 on Thursday 27 September 2018 in Lecture Hall 4

Integrating information across languages, domains of knowledge, geographic location and time scales[edit]

Wikidata screenshot of the item for species — species (Q7432)
Map of streets in the Netherlands named after taxa
Taxa by number of streets in the Netherlands that are named after them - Wikidata Query Service screenshot 2018-09-24 Wikidata Query Service

Exposing their information in a variety of open ways to both humans and machines, which facilitates the use in citizen science projects[edit]

WikiShootMe Screenshot of Jena as of 2018-09-24, showing the geolocations of Wikidata items that do (green) or do not (red) have an image, as well as of images available on Wikimedia Commons (blue).

Bringing lay people and experts together to collaborate on all aspects of the projects[edit]

New species of cranefly in the genus Megistocera discovered on Wikimedia Commons
Map of localities where frog species of the genus Paedophryne have been found.
Paintings depicting frogs - screenshot of Wikidata Query Service as of 2018-09-24

Developing and maintaining software that can be used by citizen science projects[edit]

Wikibase instances indexed in the registry as of April 2018

Providing a whole ecosystem of different ways to contribute[edit]

  • content, software, design, documentation, testing, outreach, event organization, infrastructure, fundraising, reporting, quizzes etc.
Wiki Loves Monuments — participating countries 2018
One of many possible educational activities involving Wikidata: an Everything is connected puzzle, "From poppies to New York City". Try to fill in the missing pieces. If Wikidata knows of a connection between adjacent pieces, it will show a black connector. If not, it will display a question mark instead.
Internet-in-a-Box
Wikidata:Request a query

Nurturing a global network of volunteer-driven subcommunities that work together towards shared goals[edit]

Subset of Wikimedia user groups as of September 2018

Wikimedia perspectives on the session's key issues[edit]

  • How to make sure that data collected by citizen scientists are useful and relevant for addressing scientific questions?
    • Hard to 'make sure' for data collected by anyone
    • Key ways to address the issue: transparency, documentation, provenance, and simple mechanisms to fix problems
  • How can data collected by citizen scientists be found, accessed, interpreted and used by others?
    • Wikidata is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), i.e. compliant with the FAIR Data Principles (Q29032644)
      • collecting data along with proper metadata
      • compliance with applicable standards
      • reuse-friendly standard licensed
    • Wikimedia platforms are tightly integrated with Wikidata and highly visible in search engine results pages
  • How to integrate and analyze data collected by the public with other data sources?
    • open standards
    • open APIs
    • open licenses
    • open-source tools
    • lots of outreach and collaboration
  • How to assess and improve the quality and reliability of Citizen Science data?
  • How to increase the credibility of data collected by volunteers and how to acknowledge citizen contributions?
  • How to enable citizen scientists to gain insights from data?

Notes[edit]

See also[edit]

About[edit]

This file hosts a contribution (as per these submission notes) to the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics (ICEI) on 24-28 September 2018 in Jena.

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