Impact

Wikimedia impact includes all the outcomes of engagement with Wikimedia projects. Partner organizations which use Wikimedia projects to share knowledge and media typically use traffic reporting of pageviews to measure impact. Wikimedia community organizations may measure traffic also, but the Wikimedia Foundation tends to guide community groups to judge the impact of social outreach by counting the editors that they recruit for projects and measuring how much content these editors make. Yet another kind of impact is the integration of key messages or media into the Wikimedia ecosystem, perhaps irrespective of how much traffic this content gets or who uploads it into the platform. Many partner organizations would accept all available impact reports which are available.

Most Wikimedia editors engage in Wikimedia projects for fun and may have no interest or a casual interest in precisely measuring Wikimedia impact. Situations when measuring Wikimedia impact is important is in a Wikimedian in Residence relationship between a professional Wikimedia editor and a partner institution, in Wikimedia Research, when the Wikimedia Foundation negotiates grantmaking with applicants who are developing content.

Traffic reporting

Traffic reporting centers on the "pageview", which is a count of how many times a human user has accessed a Wikipedia article in a given language in a given time range.

The canonical report of pageviews comes from the Pageviews Analysis tool.

Social outreach

Measuring the impact of social outreach centers on user accounts. Starting from the user account countless types of analysis are possible. The most popular measures center around cohorts of user accounts, and discuss the cohort in terms of the list of articles that group edited, how many times they edited, how many citations they added, how many of the articles they created new, how many images they uploaded, and then also the standard traffic report of pageviews for all those articles from the time they edited them.

The canonical report of social outreach comes from the Programs & Events Dashboard.

Content development

Key messages in text

Text content development is difficult to measure with any automated tool. In general, to do content development the program organizer uses their own documentation system to draft a set of key messages and support those with citations. Somehow the program organizer integrates these messages into Wikipedia articles, perhaps through social outreach, having a Wikimedian in Residence, or otherwise getting editors to publish the content. Thereafter, the organizer has a human view the articles containing the content to verify its placement and accuracy.

While any sort of organization may do text based content development in Wikipedia, most of the development of this engagement model comes from medical organizations. As of 2020, the organizations which have cared the most about sharing particular messages with careful wording have been medical organizations.

After a program organizer verifies content to be appropriately published in Wikipedia they may further do traffic reporting to confirm that a relevant audience is actually consuming the information.

Non-text based

Non-text based content development includes image, data, documents, and non-text media file uploads of all kinds. The Wikimedia platform has outlets and processes for managing all sorts of files. In general, file uploads go to Wikimedia Commons. Images, video, and sound files stay in Commons for further curation, but also, anyone may use these files to complement Wikipedia articles or other publications. Wikisource, the Wikimedia archive, mirrors document files and has a community process for curation there. Wikidata accepts datasets in its own way, and while users may upload datasets to Commons, most users directly edit Wikidata itself.

Some organizations are content to upload content into the Wikimedia platform and end their engagement there. Other organizations also want measures of how many times anyone views their uploads, or they want social engagement with their media collection, or they want their media integrated into Wikipedia articles at which point they measure access to that article and not only clicks of the file itself.

While there are various tools for measuring the impact of non-text based media, the most common way ways of managing this content is a mix of uploading a media collection and presuming this is sufficient in the long term; and also measuring the pageviews of the Wikipedia articles into which anyone has shared this content.

Translation of Wikipedia articles

Wikipedia exists in 300+ language versions. Organizations which wish to have global reach may encourage the translation of the content they share. Currently the only way to determine whether anyone has translated text into multiple languages of Wikipedia is to have a human check each language version.

It is possible to have a list of Wikipedia articles, then generate a report on the number of Wikipedia language versions in which those articles exist.