2025:Program/Climate Change Knowledge on Wikipedia: A Cross-Language Comparative Analysis

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Session title: Climate Change Knowledge on Wikipedia: A Cross-Language Comparative Analysis

Session type: Lecture

Track: Research

Language: en

🎥 Session recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_change_knowledge_on_wikipedia;_A_cross-Language_comparative_analysis.webm 🎥

We conducted a comparative assessment focused on article quality, citation indices, article popularity trends over a defined period, and author engagement across different climate-related topics and Wikipedia language editions. To identify the most frequently cited climate change articles, we analyzed over 1 billion wikilinks between articles extracted from Wikimedia dumps. Our initial findings uncover notable variations in the availability and depth of climate change information, reflecting disparities in knowledge dissemination, editorial engagement, and public interest among diverse linguistic communities.

Description

Climate change is one of our time's most pressing global challenges, marked by significant scientific consensus and considerable public controversy. It is a topic highly divisive, which is also reflected in online conversations (Fariello and Jemielniak 2025; Segerberg and Bennett 2011; Neff and Jemielniak 2022).

Effective communication about climate change necessitates widespread access to reliable, comprehensive, and unbiased information. Wikipedia, a global critical knowledge resource, highly accurate and updated nearly instantly, even in the case of on-going weather phenomena (Jemielniak et al. 2021), serves as an essential platform to examine the dissemination and engagement dynamics surrounding this contentious topic (Esteves and Cukierman 2012).

We want to present a systematic and methodical approach to analyzing the demand and supply dynamics for climate change information across multiple language versions of Wikipedia. Studying different language versions is particularly important, as Wikipedias’ communities cultures differ significantly (Konieczny and Lewoniewski 2024; Lewoniewski, Węcel, and Abramowicz 2023; Jemielniak and Wilamowski 2017).

We identified climate-related articles using diverse resources such as Wikiprojects’ lists, thematic categories, and Wikidata items. Subsequently, the identified articles were aligned into distinct topical areas for detailed analysis.

We conducted a comparative assessment focused on article quality, citation indices, article popularity trends over a defined period, and author engagement across different climate-related topics and Wikipedia language editions. In particular, in order to assess the quality of Wikipedia articles, we used a synthetic measure that was implemented in WikiRank.net (Lewoniewski, Węcel, and Abramowicz 2019). We also ran a big data analysis of the topic. For instance, to identify the most frequently cited climate change articles, we analyzed over 1 billion wikilinks between articles extracted from Wikimedia dumps.

Our initial findings uncover notable variations in the availability and depth of climate change information, reflecting disparities in knowledge dissemination, editorial engagement, and public interest among diverse linguistic communities. Recognizing and understanding these disparities can help foster global climate change literacy, refine targeted communication strategies, and ensure equitable access to critical environmental information, thereby empowering informed decision-making and collective action worldwide. Moreover, the presented method can be extended to analyze other controversial or complex topics.

The figures shows some of the results of the study - interactive versions are available on the webpage: https://wikimania2025.lewoniewski.info

How does your session relate to the event theme, Wikimania@20 – Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?

It is directly related to Sustainability theme - we focus on climate change knowledge building

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Resources

Speakers

Dariusz Jemielniak ("pundit")

Dariusz Jemielniak (“pundit”) is a professor at Kozminski University, faculty associate at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and served a decade on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. He is the author of Common Knowledge?, the first ethnography of the Wikipedia community, and a Wikimedia researcher.

Włodzimierz Lewoniewski

Assistant professor at the Department of Information Systems at the Poznań University of Economics and Business. Research areas: information quality, Wikipedia, DBpedia, Wikidata, fake news, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, natural language processing. More information: https://kie.ue.poznan.pl/en/wlodzimierz-lewoniewski/