Tuesday, July 5, 2011

What's already on the wikis?

In May we commissioned Laura Hale to survey the Wikimedia Foundation projects for existing content, authors and statistical data relating to the Australian Paralympic movement. Laura completed the survey across the English Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikinews, Wikiquotes and Wikisource. We don't as yet have any knowledge of what is going on in other language projects. Graham Pearce checked Laura's work to see if he thought it was missing anything, and feels it caught all he would expect to find.

In all, Laura found 62 articles existing in the English Wikipedia as of 31 May 2011, 12 articles on Wiktionary, 228 media files on Wikimedia Commons, 1 article on Wikinews, 4 articles on Wikiquote, and 1 article of Wikisource.

At the very least, we can use these primary statistics to measure the over all impact of this project. But looking deeper, Laura's work gives us some clues as to whether an existing or potential editing community exists across the projects.

Based on Laura's survey of English Wikipedia, we can see that there are 6 users who have initiated more than 3 new Wikipedia articles that relate to Australia at the Paralympics. Based on that information, we will make contact with those users, tell them about our project, invite them to participate, and offer them library support for accessing information and media that might help them edit more pages relating to Australia at the Paralympics. We're aiming to begin this outreach work in mid July.