Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/Tips and tricks

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Tips and tricks

Data analytics for your list of created articles

Experienced Wikipedians have often a long list of created articles. But what do they know about those articles? How can they have some metrics or analytics to follow their collection of created articles?

XTools provides some insights about your list of created articles[1]. Pageviews provides a userviews tabset with the number of pageviews for each article created by a user[2]. But what about the gender distribution of the biographies I've created? Which is the main occupation of people I've written about? Where are located the places for which I've created an article? And if we come to the content of the articles. Which of my articles is the longest one? Which one has the largest number of references?

By using the XTools pages created API, I've developed a set of new tools to answer all those questions[3].

Screenshot of "User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia": Gender distribution of articles I've created in Wikipedia in French[4]

At first, I was very curious about the gender distribution of people I've created a biographical article about. So I've used the Wikidata API to get the value of the property sex or gender (P21) for all items corresponding to articles a user has created. This first tool is named "User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia"[5].

Screenshot of "Look at your list of created articles through Wikidata": Distribution of articles I've created in Wikipedia in French by instance of (P31).[6]

This tool can easily be extended to other Wikidata properties such as instance of (P31) and country (P17) and for humans country of citizenship (P27) and occupation (P106). This lead to another tool named "Look at your list of created articles through Wikidata".[7]

Another tool provides a map of your articles related to geolocated Wikidata items using property coordinate ___location (P625).[8]

Screenshot of "Look at your list of created articles with the XTools Page Prose API": List of articles I've created in Wikipedia in English sorted by number of words and by number of references[9]

We can also have insights about the content of our articles. XTools page prose API gives the number of words, references, unique references and sections in each article. So I've developed a notebook which computes this for all the articles created by a user.[10]

Screenshot of "Look at your list of created articles with the XTools Page ArticleInfo API": List of articles I've created in Wikipedia in English sorted by number of revisions and by number of editors.[11]

My last tool collects data about the number of revisions, the number of editors, the number of pageviews and the number of watchers for all articles a user has created using XTools articleinfo API.[12]

All my tools are developed in JavaScript using Observable, a datavisualization platform created by Melody Meckfessel and Mike Bostock which makes it very easy to design interactive tools. One shortcoming is that you may experience some timeout errors since my tools rely on a high number of API calls. I can imagine that if you've created more than 2,000 articles, you may have a lot timeout errors. All my work is open source. So feel free to improve it and suggest better solutions. And of course all your feedbacks are greatly appreciated.

References