Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2015/02
February 2015[edit]
February 18, 2015 Video: YouTube
- Global South User Survey 2014
- By Haitham Shammaa
- Users' trends in the Global South have significantly changed over the past two years, and given the increase in interest in Global South communities and their activities, we wanted this survey to focus on understanding the statistics and needs of our users (both readers, and editors) in the regions listed in the WMF's New Global South Strategy. This survey aims to provide a better understanding of the specific needs of local user communities in the Global South, as well as provide data that supports product and program development decision making process.
- Ingesting Open Geodata: Observations from OpenStreetMap
- By Alan McConchie
- As Wikidata grapples with the challenges of ingesting external data sources such as Freebase, what lessons can we learn from other open knowledge projects that have had similar experiences? OpenStreetMap, often called "The Wikipedia of Maps", is a crowdsourced geospatial data project covering the entire world. Since the earliest years of the project, OSM has combined user contributions with existing data imported from external sources. Within the OSM community, these imports have been controversial; some core OSM contributors complain that imported data is lower quality than user-contributed data, or that it discourages the growth of local mapping communities. In this talk, I'll review the history of data imports in OSM, and describe how OSM's best-practices have evolved over time in response to these critiques.