Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Future Audiences

Future Audiences is one of the "buckets" within the Wikimedia Foundation's 2024-25 Annual Plan. Its purpose is to explore strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of readers/reusers and contributors in an effort to truly reach everyone in the world as the "essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". This bucket aligns with Movement Strategy Recommendation #9 (Innovate in Free Knowledge).

In fiscal year 2023-24, the Wikimedia Foundation tracked important changes to how and where people get information online, noting the popularity of short-form video and a new generation of AI tools like ChatGPT. Through research and experimentation (Experiments: conversational/generative AI and Experiments: engaging global youth on social apps) in these two areas, the Future Audiences team was able to learn the following:

  • Despite its popularity, ChatGPT is not typically used to get encyclopedic information. People still rely on navigating to and reading Wikipedia to get facts, and fact-check the output of ChatGPT with other resources (including Wikipedia).
  • Large language models (LLMs) like GPT and LLaMas can be used to search for, analyze, and summarize information in Wikipedia with reasonably high (but not perfect) accuracy. They could be used to make it easier for readers to parse long, complex topics on our projects, or to help verify off-wiki claims against what is contained in Wikipedia.
  • Younger audiences increasingly prefer to get information via short video, and there are successful creators on popular short video platforms like YouTube and TikTok who make educational content using facts and images from Wikipedia.

This year, we will continue to investigate strategies to engage new audiences in sharing, collecting, and improving knowledge in new ways. Our goal is to find actionable insights for new products or programs to prioritize in the following year's annual plan.

If you're interested in getting engaged with this work, please sign up here.

Objectives, Key Results, Hypotheses

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2024-25

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This fiscal year, Future Audiences has the following OKRs:

Objective (what we want to achieve):

  • Provide recommendations on strategic investments for the Wikimedia Foundation to pursue – based on insights from experiments that sharpen our understanding of how knowledge is shared and consumed online – that help our movement serve new audiences in a changing internet.

Key result (how we will know if we are successful this fiscal year):

  • As result of Future Audiences experimental insights and recommendations, by the end of Q3 (March 2025) at least one objective or key result owned by a non-Future Audiences team is present in the draft for the following year's annual plan.

Hypotheses (experiments we want to run in order to meet our key result):

  • “Add A Fact:” If we make off-site contribution very low effort with an AI-powered “Add a Fact” experiment, we can learn whether off-platform users could help grow/sustain the knowledge store in a possible future where Wikipedia content is mainly consumed off-platform.
  • "Generated Video:" Can we reach less-engaged younger audiences by remixing community-curated Wikipedia content into short video and posting on popular short video platforms?
  • "Discord bot:" Can a Discord bot help us learn about whether and how people might want to interact with a conversational-AI-powered Wikipedia off-platform, and help us reach/increase engagement with Wikipedia among younger audiences?

2023-24

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Within the annual plan's Future Audiences "bucket", there were two Objectives and three associated Key Results:

FA1: Describe multiple potential strategies

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Through which Wikimedia could satisfy our goal of being the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge.

  1. KR1. Participants in Future Audiences work (internal staff and community members) are equipped with at least three candidate strategies for how Wikimedia projects (especially Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons) will remain the “essential infrastructure of free knowledge” in the future, including the audiences they would reach, the hypotheses they test, and approaches for testing them.

FA2: Test hypotheses

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To validate or invalidate potential strategies for the future, starting with a focus on third party content platforms.

  1. KR1. Test a hypothesis aimed at reaching global youth audiences where they are on leading third-party content platforms, to generate ideas for products we can build on or off our sites, which can help increase their engagement with Wikimedia content as consumers and contributors. See Experiments: engaging global youth on social apps
  2. KR2. Test a hypothesis around conversational AI knowledge seeking, to explore how people can discover and engage with content from Wikimedia projects. See Experiments: conversational/generative AI

FAQ

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If you're curious about any of the following...

  • Why devote WMF resources to "Future Audiences" now, when there are many things that should be improved for our current users?
  • What is the different between an experiment and a product?
  • Why run experiments on commercial platforms like ChatGPT? Isn't that counter to our mission?

... and more, see: Future Audiences/FAQ

Regular public conversations

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Date Topic Links
Next
Past
October 31, 2024 Short video and Add a Fact

What we've learned from more than 85 Wikipedians experimenting with Add a Fact, and launch data from the short video experiment on early launch data from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube

September 26, 2024 Generative video recording
August 1, 2024 Pre-Wikimania 2024 conversation
  • New fiscal year updates (team updates, OKRs, etc.) - Maryana
  • Citation Needed experiment overview (what we tried, what we learned) - Maryana
  • Add a Fact MVP overview - Francisco
  • Q&A on Add a Fact and other possible ideas for engaging contributors in new ways/places
  • Any other questions and topics arising.
May 13, 2024 Annual Planning – Spanish/Latin America

Agenda:

  • Intro to Future Audiences – what it is and why WMF is doing it (10 min)
  • Discussion: LATAM-specific traffic trends: Look at Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2023-2024/Reports/Core Metrics Q2/Appendix#By user region together and discuss: what may be contributing to traffic declines in Latin America? What different factors may be at play (for example: country-specific, audience-specific, demographic, technological, other)? How aware are communities of these trends and has there been any discussion/proposed actions? What could be a good next step to continue this discussion with the broader Spanish and Portuguese communities? (30 min)
  • Other important trends to think about/discuss as a movement (i.e., what's happening in related sectors – i.e., education; digital literacy; advocacy, etc.) (10 min)
  • Interpretation in Spanish, but anyone is welcome. We are also looking into interpretation in Portuguese.
May 5, 2023 Annual Planning focus group
August 3, 2023 Monthly call
September 14, 2023 Monthly call

"Conversational AI & Social apps"

Part 1, Part 2

October 19, 2023 Monthly call
  1. AI & attribution presentation
  2. Engaging youth on third-party video platforms:
    1. Basque Ikusgela presentation
    2. WMUK TikTok channel
    3. WMF TikTok experiment
December 14, 2023
  • A collaborative mapping of possible strategies the Wikimedia movement could pursue to ensure that Wikimedia content and communities continue to thrive in the face of changing technology and user behavior trends
  • A brief recap of some conversations on this topic that began at WikiConference North America last month, then collectively map out and discuss the key features, risks, and opportunities of several potential strategies
  • This mapping will inform the annual Wikimedia Foundation External Trends update
15 February 2024 Monthly call
  • Welcome, context of 'future audiences'
  • @14:40 - Conclusion of ChatGPT plugin experiment (report & slides);
  • 35:00 - introduction of "citation needed" browser extension experiment
  • 55:00 - invittion to "AI Sauna" event, Helsinki
 Recording (& transcript)
April 18, 2024 Focusing on Citation Needed.


Sign up to participate!

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Please sign your name below if you're interested in following this work. If applicable, please indicate any areas that particularly interest you (e.g., AI, social apps, video/rich media, future trends research).

  1. User: Yassinsamirhegazy Interested in AI and future trends and web development technologies.
  2. User: Charity Everett Interested in creating a spatialized WebXR collaboratively edited version of Wikipedia.
  3. User: Aisha_Khatun Interested in AI and future trends research with GenAI in the picture.
  4. User: Newton Kamau (AI)
  5. User:Waltercolor
  6. User:Natalia Ćwik (WMPL)
  7. User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)
  8. User:Grzegorz Kopaczewski (WMPL)
  9. Klara Sielicka-Baryłka (WMPL) (talk) 08:54, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Bertux (talk) 19:47, 16 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Sandizer (talk)
  12. --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 17:43, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  13. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 21:57, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Jklamo (talk) 09:06, 21 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  15. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:12, 22 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Frostly (talk) 20:17, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Rtnf (talk) 05:49, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  18. --Count Count (talk) 15:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Fuzheado (talk) 15:55, 13 July 2023 (UTC) - I was the initiator of en:Wikipedia:AI and have documented a number of experiments at en:User:Fuzheado/ChatGPT. I will also be on a panel at Wikimania 2023 regarding AI, organized by Shani and joined by User:Jimbo.[reply]
  20. Shani Evenstein Sigalov
  21. Soni (talk) 02:44, 14 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  22. Theklan, interested in both AI generated content, multimedia (c:Category:Ikusgela), and rich media (eu:Topic:Wr0cgff9sat6mv3k). -Theklan (talk) 08:28, 14 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  23. User: Heike Gleibs (WMDE) (talk) 08:36, 14 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  24. Tarkowski (talk) 11:50, 14 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  25. AyourAchtouk (talk) 13:19, 14 July 2023 (UTC) - interested in AI generated content[reply]
  26. Identifying differences between WMF AI ethics and Wikimedia community AI ethics Bluerasberry (talk) 17:38, 14 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  27. Adithyak1997 (talk) 10:48, 15 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  28. Interested to know about a) attribution to volunteer community and its labour, b) clear notice on possible biases and constantly changing content, c) larger AI ethical concerns, d) PR (avoiding fanboi/AI hype and stating what it is -- experiments of generative content using content created by volunteers) --Psubhashish (talk) 15:23, 15 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Interested! 2601:249:8200:8390:CC24:A641:6BD7:3154 00:21, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  29. Interested in solutions to combat "plausible falsehoods" created by AI chatbots. Sobaka (talk) 17:58, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  30. Alalch E. (talk)
  31. Dyork (talk) 15:08, 18 July 2023 (UTC) - AI, future trends[reply]
  32. Mathglot (talk) 07:12, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  33. DancingPhilosopher(User talk:DancingPhilosopher) 20:48, 19 July 2023
  34. Using chatGPT as part of the wikiedu / wikiversity student experience Stevesuny (talk) 15:52, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  35. Oceanflynn (talk) 16:29, 20 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  36. Kasyap (talk) 05:49, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  37. Waldyrious (talk) 11:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC) Interested in systems that might allow LLMs to expose their confidence in the information they output, restrict it to verifiable facts, and provide sources for them.[reply]
  38. Doc Taxon (talk) 04:31, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  39. Interested with AI content (with its biases) and future trends. Lofhi (talk) 18:54, 1 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  40. Tizianopiccardi (talk) - AI, Information seeking behaviour
  41. –SJ talk  23:05, 3 August 2023 (UTC) - ofc :)[reply]
  42. Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk)
  43. Hfordsa (talk) 03:46, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  44. Baltakatei (talk) 21:25, 14 September 2023 (UTC) : Iʼm interested in how LLMs may facilitate use of chemical process simulators.[reply]
  45. CorraleH. Interested in the generative context for education outcomes based on Wikimedia projects. 04:07, 10 October 2023 (UTC).[reply]
  46. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 21:54, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  47. Interested in discussing the significance and implications of generative bots constituting one of our primary audiences. Doctorxgc (talk) 15:21, 19 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  48. 94rain Talk 07:06, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  49. Interested in Social apps Lebron jay (talk)u
  50. Benoît Prieur (talk) 09:23, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  51.  A l p h a m a  Talk 14:20, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  52. Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 16:37, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  53. Laurie Capill 26 January 2024. Interested in helping trial AI as an efficient means of sourcing reliable information in my specific areas of knowlege/interest (including earth sciences, resources management and global resilience/transformation). Particularly interested in the potential role of AI as a reliable tool for the conduct of community/political debates that is less prone to misinformation than existing social media platforms.
  54. --Zache (talk) 10:17, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  55. VisbyStar (talk) 13:23, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  56. --Joalpe (talk) 18:20, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  57. Focused on social apps. Chlod (say hi!) 05:03, 5 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  58. Interested in new knowledge domains and applications —Ismael Olea (talk) 16:01, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  59. --Txtdgtl (WMMX) (talk) 04:14, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  60. --SCP-2000 05:01, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  61. --Hammunculs (talk) 13:53, 10 April 2024 (UT
  62. --User: Jesse Lynn
  63. --Paula (WDU) (talk) 15:04, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  64. User: Eminayiden AI & Future Trends
  65. -- User: AmClark472 Community organizing, social media, mental health, built environment
  66. -- User: Krishna13h Interested in AI and future trends research.
  67. --Ocaasi (talk) 21:36, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  68. Bodhisattwa (talk) 03:44, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  69. User: Rahmot_Afolabi Generative AI, Social Apps, Future Trends Research 22:44, 23 July 2024 (WAT)
  70. User:John Broughton - interested in increasing the number of new editors
  71. PMurvar (talk) - interactive activation of networked information
  72. Danysan1 (talk) 20:48, 12 August 2024 (UTC) - AI as support for editors and moderators[reply]
  73. bhogera (talk) Strategic plan , youth engagement , web development
  74. User: Iditminka (AI, social apps, video/rich media, future trends research)
  75. User:Mika77 Python, AI, innovation, future trends research, Dad
  76. User:TiagoLubiana Interested in the nterplay of AI and ontologies/KGs, and how both can improve the experience of Wikimedia volunteers
  77. User: JMD8 Interested in AI and exploring how user input into LLM models can be utilized to create a factual knowledge base.
  78. User: MPKraft Interested in how AI and other technologies can be used to enhance the user experience with Wikipedia.
  79. User:ProfGray - I’ve tried showing and educating about Wikipedia through my TikTok account (45K followers), so interesting in leveraging of social media for (and with) Wikipedia, Commons, etc
  80. User:Prototyperspective Interested mainly in opportunities of AI in the Wikimedia ecosystem. Made several AI-based proposals including the Machine Translated Wikipedia Project draft and currently experimenting with redubbing videos to other languages, spoken Wikipedia & adding subtitles. Interested esp. in increasing contributor efficiency and making contributing more engaging and attractive to potential new editors as well as social media / richmedia such as videos based on Wikipedia articles of which I made some (Science Summary) and better support for mobile. --Prototyperspective (talk) 19:44, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  81. AdamSobieski (talk) 11:11, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  82. User: Akc2182 Interested in conversational AI experiments
  83. Interested in all the tings, especially social media things --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:50, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  84. User:TJMSmith Interested in AI, emerging and future capabilities, future trends.

See also

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References

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