User:Jonathan Cardy (WMUK)/Targetting Wiki takes events
draft blog post
One of the things that a chapter can do is organise Wiki takes events, photography days where Wikimedians use their cameras to photograph things for Wikipedia and other projects. In the last few months we have been pondering the question of where to go next after successful events in places like Chester and Coventry. In the past we have held these events in places where a local or fairly local volunteer has wanted to hold them. But to maximise the effectiveness of these events we would like to target future ones at places where we are shortest of images.
So one Saturday in February I discussed went to a meetup in Cambridge and discussed the problem with EN:User:Magnus Manske.
Magnus thought about it for a second or two and explained that the answer was Wikidata, and promptly wrote a tool on Wikilabs to produce a heatmap of Wikidata entries without images.
This produced missing images heatmaps for:
This tells us that our next Wikitakes events in the UK would be most effective in London, especially in Westminster and the City. Though Manchester, Southampton and Liverpool may also be worth doing. By contrast Coventry now comes across as very cool on the heatmap, which shows that running a Wikitakes event has a real effect online.
To use the tool for other parts of the world just replace the "Q145" in http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/missing_images.html?region=Q145 with any other Wikidata item of an administrative unit. Cambridgeshire is Q23112, London is Q84, Sweden Q34
Of course another consequence of heat maps is that it highlights some of our problems with under-representing certain parts of the world. Q230 is the country of Georgia which comes across as markedly cooler than the state of Georgia. So cool on this map can either mean that we don't have many articles in an area or that we do have articles, but we have images for them.