Create 2024/Developing Wikimedia Impact Metrics to Encourage Academic Engagement: Submissions:2021/News On Wiki, Phase 2 complete

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2024.

Despite the growing interest in open educational resources in higher education, relatively few academics have significantly committed to sharing their research expertise in open knowledge projects. In fact, they often face opportunity costs when engaging with platforms like Wikipedia, as the time spent contributing can detract from more traditional scholarly outputs, such as peer-reviewed publications, conferences, and pursuing grants. As a potential solution to this problem, we have proposed the development of a suite of impact metrics, including items such as direct contributions to Wikipedia articles, research citations in Wikipedia, page views, and others (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross). This session reports on our efforts surveying and interviewing academics who have previously engaged Wikipedia to identify the most relevant metrics for indicating impact, developing these metrics, soliciting feedback, and integrating them into a dashboard prototype. By engaging directly with the Wikimedia community, we hope to ensure that the developed metrics accurately capture the diverse ways in which Wikimedia projects contribute to knowledge dissemination and societal impact.