How can I get data about Wikipedians (e.g. language proficiency), by username?

Question

Is there an open dataset containing information such as username, language proficiency levels (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Babel/Levels) and (possibly) academic degrees and nationality of Wikipedians? This info is (often) displayed in Users' pages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:usernamepages in the form of badges. I am not looking for aggregates, but for granular username-level data.

I couldn't find data of this kind at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/.

Answer 1

You can easily create your own, either by scraping the HTML or parsing down the full export/dump.

First, get a list of lists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_by_degree

Then, loop through each list

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_with_PhD_degrees

And collect the usernames per degree.

If you need more data, for example degree AND region, then it's easy enough to parse the HTML, and identify the relevant userbox, although be careful for users with multiple degrees/nationalities.

<div class="wikipediauserbox" style="float:left;border:1px solid #808080;margin:1px;width:238px">
   <table role="presentation" style="border-collapse:collapse;width:238px;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;background:#FFEEEE">
      <tr>
         <td style="border:0;width:45px;height:45px;background:#FF8888;text-align:center;font-size:14pt;font-weight:bold;color:black;padding:0 1px 0 0;line-height:1.25em;vertical-align:middle">PhD</td>
         <td style="border:0;text-align:left;font-size:8pt;padding:0 4px 0 4px;height:45px;line-height:1.25em;color:black;vertical-align:middle">This user has a <a href="/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy" title="Doctor of Philosophy">Doctor of Philosophy</a> degree.</td>
      </tr>
   </table>
</div>

You can make it even easier and just say that a userpage that, for example, links to /wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy has a PhD.

You'll also have to pick a language page (en for example), since userpages are also language specific.