Wikidata:WikiProject Scholia/Robustifying/Growth
Growth of Scholia includes all the project development which makes the tool more effective in the Wikimedia environment. Scholia began in October 2016 as a project to create academic profiles with Wikidata. Scholia could become a tool of general broad global use, and as such, the rate of its growth informs its development. If parts of Scholia grow too quickly then they will exceed the limits of resources available to operate the tool, such as computation, satisfactory availability and quality of data, administrative support, and accessibility. If parts of Scholia grow more slowly than expected, then also the direction of development should change to recognize how the popularity of various features change and require more or less development at different times.
2019 goal: grow to double some usage metrics edit
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In 2019, the Scholia team had not defined or published key metrics. It was however decided to grow Scholia to double with respect to some relevant indicators, without knowing what precisely these metrics would be. To tackle this goal, there must thus first be published measurements from an early point in time, then a doubling at a later point in time. Note that the goal here is for the growth to be healthy, not maximal, especially in light of the extensive testing taking place in this phase and when keeping in mind the imits of Wikidata.
Engagement in this project increased in several key metrics at, including presence of the Scholia template in Wikipedia articles, and number of followers in third party community media platforms. The doubled engagement is significant as an indication of sustained project development and the project's ability to grow engagement at will. Because Scholia is still a new project in development, the purpose of this growth is to check the project's potential, to solicit community feedback, and to develop best practices for managing growth. There is no present goal to seek maximal growth, as Scholia is not complete enough for us to assure positive and satisfying experiences for the anticipated future general audience.
This project develops Scholia such that its use and development should peg to and scale with the completeness of its rollout in the Wikimedia platform and the universe of Wikimedia platform usage. Since the Wikimedia platform has been a top-10 website in popularity since 2005, this project takes for granted that the world will use and access Scholia if only Scholia is in moderate working condition and accessible.
In January 2019, the daily pageviews to Scholia averaged around 5-6,000; in October 2019, they averaged about 9-10,000. In March 2019, the Scholia template linking English Wikipedia pages to a corresponding Scholia profile existed in 294 articles by the end of March, and in about twice as many in mid-November, by which time these pages had about 400,000 total pageviews per day. On October 24, 2019, the project started a Twitter account, and in November 2019, there were 80 followers. In March 2019, the project had 12 forks on GitHub, as compared to 29 in November.
The primary barrier to our seeking unrestricted growth is our awareness of the technical limits of Wikidata itself. Scholia is not computationally heavy among Wikidata's near future projected capacity, but it does hit limits of the capability of what Wikidata can do now. As Wikidata's technical limits should expand beyond Scholia's needs within 2 years, our priority is to anticipate growth rather than seeking to create it.
Key resources edit
- Scholia growth tickets in GitHub
Growth goals for 2020 edit
Besides the visualizations, Scholia has a number of additional functionalities e.g. regarding entity recognition or reference management. The latter is due to a Python library that processes BibTeX and thereby provides the ability to cite references in TeX/LaTeX documents through their Wikidata identifier or DOI, such that the citation is generated based on the reference’s metadata as available from Wikidata.This mechanism, while functional, needs to be made more comprehensive and robust. If that is achieved and its usage scaled up, this would provide a compelling way for the community of BibTeX users to share the curation of their metadata through Wikidata.
We currently have no plans to expand this functionality beyond TeX/LaTeX for other writing environments, but a related JavaScript library, Citation.js (Willighagen 2019), is being developed with input from the Scholia team, and so is pandoc-wikicite, a filter for the open-source document converter tool Pandoc (Voß 2019). Both libraries can handle formats beyond BibTeX and Wikidata and could help expand a collaborative way of reference metadata management beyond the TeX community. Zotero has also been integrated with Wikidata in a way that allows data exchange in both directions. It can ingest and output files in a variety of formats including BibTeX, so it can serve as a bridge between different writing environments. Another important development in this space is that Citoid, a MediaWiki extension that facilitates reference management on Wikimedia sites other than Wikidata, is scheduled to be adapted to Wikidata in the coming months, which will provide further integration with Wikimedia writing workflows.—Scholia team, Robustifying Scholia, 2019