Wikidata:WikiProject Climate Change/nomination 2019

In October 2019 I user:bluerasberry and my colleague user:Daniel Mietchen nominated the Wikimedia community for Climate Outreach (Q59536350)'s "2019 Climate Change Public Engagement Award". What follows is the application we submitted and other details.

Details

Climate Outreach uses non-free copyright licensing. Consequently, this page only presents the text of our answers, and not the original questions when they were copyrightable phrases.

There is a cash prize of GBP1000. We as applicants are less interested in this and more interested in participating in the contest, hoping for interaction with others interested in communicating information related to climate change. We suggested that if this nomination wins, then Wikimedia UK (Q7999857) should accept on behalf of the Wikimedia community. A Wikimedia community organization is appropriate for accepting this prize.

Questions

Project title - Wikimedia community edits climate change content in Wikipedia

(names of project participants) About 10,000 people editing climate change-related content and 200,000 others in a supporting role share equal credit

start date 15 January 2001

Is this project ongoing? Yes

Project location Global and online

Project funded by - Donations of users, albeit not specifically for climate change-related purposes

Project Description (100 words or fewer)

The mission of Wikipedia is to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge to every single person on the planet. Volunteer editors of Wikipedia have developed general reference information on climate change, including 1600 articles in English, translations of this and original topics in other languages, complementary media including images and data, and the administrative structure to continually update this content. The Wikimedia community does this in accord with its principles to promote civil discussion, diversity and inclusion of all global perspectives, and the recognition of reliable sources which it cites.

Describe project

Wikimedia projects have about 150,000 unique volunteer contributors per month, with about half of them contributing in English and half in other languages. Most of them work on Wikipedia, which is the prose and text of the encyclopedia. Wikimedia communities of volunteers which provide familiar necessary support services include managing of images in Commons, structuring data and queries in Wikidata, archiving in Wikisource, and administering the entire platform with volunteer support through Wikimedia community organizations.

With regard to climate change specifically, there have been thousands of unaffiliated volunteer editors making editorial contributions and suggestions to the climate change articles. As a digitally native publication platform, Wikipedia logs the (digital) user identity, time, and the editorial contribution of each of these. Another class of contributors, not necessarily more engaged, are those who join collaborative "wikiprojects" for particular topics including "climate change", "meteorology", for various regions or ecosystems, species, politics, statistics, or any topic which references climate change.

As is customary in Wikimedia platforms, there are no assigned roles, but rather individual contributors organize or not as they like, and contribute time, research, content, software and administrative or other support as they wish. As every activity in the Wikimedia platform produces a digital record, it is possible to query community engagement by topic or subtopic (climate change, species, region, etc), by language community, by media format (text versus data versus image), or in other dimensions.

Describe audience

The project reached the 1-2 billion people using online search engines to seek information, including about climate change. Wikipedia articles are among the first returned results for all popular search services, which means that the project directly reached the demographic of people who were using Internet queries to inform themselves about climate change and all related issues. It indirectly reached people who are in social networks with search engine users. Wikipedia users are citizens and information consumers, including students, journalists, policy makers, and typical people who refer to Wikipedia on their mobile devices while having conversations involving climate change-related topics.

Audience count

The project has directly reached at least 100 million people since 2001 as measured and approximated through pageviews.

As a digitally native platform Wikipedia provides traffic metrics reports to each and every Wikipedia article in every language. Available metrics reports include query of the audience count to Wikipedia's articles related to climate change, the count of volunteers who have edited this media content, engagement by language what languages, contribution of photographs or files, how often and in what context there was a multi-party discussion, the curation of structured data or reference data collections, and various visualizations of academic publications.

Impact

The project produced the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted corpus of climate change information which exists. It attracted global multilingual editorial comment and contributions from communities globally, as Wikipedia attracts participation in approximate proportion to the engagement of any communities participating in online discourse.

Future plans

Despite Wikipedia's proven history as an excellent channel for accomplishing distribution and dissemination of information on climate change, there is a lack of awareness among expert organizations in climate change that Wikipedia volunteers invite them to edit. The Wikipedia community continually seeks new Wikipedia editors or casual feedback and contributions from anyone who would share their thoughts. We are nominating Wikipedia for this award to communicate that Wikipedia invites organizations to edit Wikipedia as a way to deliver their information to the largest audience that the Internet offers.

Why should judges choose you as winner

This project deserves special recognition because it has published content which is globally familiar, inclusive of diverse views from reliable sources, a bulwark against misinformation and for scientific consensus, free and open nonprofit media, and which invites the meaningful participation and influence of everyone who can participate in Wikipedia's civil online community.

No one has ever funded the development of Wikipedia's content on climate change, which is unfortunate especially because to do so an educational organization in the field of climate change need only to fund itself and its own staff to share information in Wikipedia. Wikipedia does have standards for quality and collaboration, and for the organizations willing to engage, Wikipedia offers top-level access into popular global media.

Website

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Climate_Change

Say anything more

The content of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects comes from the community of volunteers. While no one person or organization can speak for individual volunteers among the international crowd of volunteers who have curated this media collection, the Wikimedia community does recognize Wikimedia community-based nonprofit organizations to represent it for institutional collaborations. In case of a collaboration with Climate Change, Wikimedia UK is a registered charity and the Wikimedia community's regional representative to globally connect any UK project with all other Wikimedia volunteer organizations.

Can you come to award ceremony?

Maybe in person Yes through video-link