Wikidata:Usability and usefulness

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Here, the Wikidata Development Team organizes and shares work on making Wikidata more useful and usable for our users. To gain knowledge about user needs, we bring in our experiences at Meetups, Conferences and on mailinglists. We also do focused research like interviews and test our software for usability. Visit our UX activities page to learn more about how you can participate.

People trying out a new interface

What we learn is often summarized in examples of use, little stories known as "scenarios". Since many different users are interested in Wikidata, we try to remind ourselves of this diversity by having "example users" which serve as an example of how a user of a broad cluster (like "very active Wikidata editor") could be like. If we learn something new, we will update these materials. There are different levels of certainty about such assumptions, which we also try to communicate – is it something that is more a merely plausible assumption or is it research-tested and has gone through a check by other community members?

Scenarios:[edit]

Scenarios are examples of typical tasks and workflows.

Example users:[edit]

Example users are brief descriptions of different, plausible user types.

UX Research[edit]

Current[edit]

Archive[edit]

User needs and activities[edit]
Heavvy Commons Users[edit]

Summary: People who often contribute to Wikimedia commons use various tools that play an important role in their work With these tools they can do bulk edits (which is the most frequent type of editing). They structure data with templates and categories; maintenance categories serve to signify TODOs. To find the "right" categories to add, they look at similar images or traverse categories. Finding images is not easy, they look at categories or use the commons link in Wikipedia Articles.

Heavvy Commons Users, late 2016 (to the pdf with slides on Wikimedia Commons)

Wiktionary Users[edit]
  • An interest in Language(s) itself seems to be common: linguistics, learning languages, preserving a language, etymology... Specializations are more towards »improving etymologies«, »vocabulary I learned« and less towards a topic like »Animals« or »Technology«.
  • Data on Wiktionary is structured explicitly using Wikitext templates. Links to words, grammatical Forms, phonetic transcription etc. have own templates. Knowing the most basic templates (~20) is needed to edit Wiktionary successfully.
  • The communities are much smaller than the one on de.WP or en.WP. This leads to “Recent Changes” being actually useful and that Article talk pages are less used. Instead, meeting places like “tea room” are used for article discussions. A small community does not mean that people know each other in person.

Wiktionary Users early 2017 (to pdf with summary poster on Wikimedia Commons)

Workflows and motivations of Wikidata editors[edit]

Wikidata Editors…

  • …worked from lists (Petscan; Listeria, Recent changes…) which provide an overview of ToDos and provide links to the items (see graphic)
  • …had large ("reduce gender gap") and more concrete topics ("add woman painters from the 18th century from a catalog") they care about
  • …used references, ranks and value specifiers rarely. These functions are often not understood as intended

Workflows and motivations of Wikidata editors, late 2017 (which has a summary, results and the archived call for participants)

Interviews of users of lexicographical data[edit]
Report on Wikidata Use in Cultural Institutions[edit]

From June-September 2019, our UX researcher Jan talked to 16 users who worked at different cultural (“GLAM”) institutions to find out about “How and why do people in cultural institutions use Wikidata?” and thus learn more about participants’ motivations, activities and problems.

In the report, we describe…

  • The advantages participants saw in sharing data
  • Problems of modeling
  • How people come to Wikidata via Wikimedia Commons
  • …

Wikidata Use in Cultural Institutions (pdf), published 11/2019, data gathering and analysis June-September 2019

Wikidata Query Creation and List Generation for Data Maintenance[edit]

We talked to 9 users who use queries and lists to support their maintenance work on Wikidata and learned about their workflows.

  • Queries and lists are important tools for Wikidata and Wikipedia maintenance tasks.
  • Queries define the to-be-retrieved data, lists make the retrieved data usable for manual or automated editing for maintenance.
  • Participants query for Items which lack data or have a problematic modeling.
  • The query language SPARQL is often needed to create lists
  • The workflows that our participants showed us used a lot of social and technological skills which need to be learned.

Research Report Wikidata Query Creation and List Generation for Data Maintenance.pdf (file) published May 2020

Wikidata: Easier Access for Programmers[edit]

We want to improve the data access for programmers and tool builders for the open community project Wikidata. For this, we studied the motivations, activities and problems of 4 subject matter experts in open data and 13 Programmers, 11 of them with experience in working with Wikidata. Additionally, 89 community members participated in a survey on their use of different data access methods.

  • People need to know why they should use Wikidata in the first place. What Wikidata offers is different from platforms offering thematically curated data in tabular form, which was how most subject matter experts usually accessed data.
  • Navigating the documentation for data access was a hurdle for data newcomers and even very experienced members of the Wikidata community. The main problem is not one of flawed content but of navigation and finding action-oriented, easy-to-try information
  • For people who want to become more involved and create more complex combinations of tools, it is most likely that learning from and with a community of like-minded people is beneficial. The difficulties to get into contact with others poses a relevant barrier of entry.

Research Report Easier Access for Programmers.pdf (file), published in October 2020

Wikidata: Community Survey

While we have quite some knowledge about the Wikidata community, particularly about the very active members, we lacked a general and overview of the community and its structure. Thus, we created a short survey to gather data on community members’ demographics and activities. The insights can be used by both Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikidata community as a baseline for future metrics and to guide activities.

  • Most participants are binary male, young, from the global north, employed and have between 1000 and 100 000 edits
  • A lot of participants started editing Wikidata 2012/2013
  • The tenure or edit count of participants seems to have no meaningful relation with the diversity of gender or place of living.
  • Some activities on Wikidata go together: There is a cluster of collaborating, events and outreach activities and a weaker cluster of adding and cleaning data

Research Report Wikidata Community Survey 2021

Usability Testing[edit]

Third Party Research[edit]

research by others

Resources[edit]

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