Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 3/English Wikipedia
Information edit
What group or community is this source coming from?
| name of group | English Wikipedia |
| virtual location (page-link) or physical location (city/state/country) | w:en:Wikipedia talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2017 |
| Location type (e.g. local wiki, Facebook, in-person discussion, telephone conference) | local wiki |
| # of participants in this discussion | 71 |
Summary edit
- Key Insight
- The Western encyclopedia model is not serving the evolving needs of people who want to learn.
- Knowledge sharing has become highly social across the globe.
- Much of the world's knowledge is yet to be documented on our sites and it requires new ways to integrate and verify sources.
- The discovery and sharing of trusted information have historically continued to evolve.
- Trends in misinformation are increasing and may challenge the ability for Wikimedians to find trustworthy sources of knowledge.
- Mobile will continue to grow. Products will evolve and use new technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. These will change how we create, present, and distribute knowledge.
- As the world population undergoes major shifts, the Wikimedia movement has an opportunity to help improve the knowledge available in more places and to more people.
- Readers in seven of our most active countries have little understanding of how Wikipedia works, is structured, is funded, and how content is created.
- Overall (either)
- supportive
- concern
- neutral
| Line | Week # | Key insight | Summary Statement | Overall | Keyword |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | A | We could work with Kahn Academy, or with Osmosis. | supportive | partners |
| 2 | 1 | A | A particular way of facing these real world problems may threaten Wikipedia. | concern | threats |
| 3 | 1 | A | We shouldn't compromise the quality of what we have built and we should keep striving for more. | concern | quality |
| 4 | 1 | A | How do we balance the needs of the different audiences we serve? | supportive | audiences |
| 5 | 1 | A | Simple well-written overviews as leads should be encouraged. | supportive | overviews |
| 6 | 1 | A | Wikibooks and Wikiversity can host instructional content, but they need development. | supportive | sister projects |
| 7 | 1 | A | What is the Western encyclopedia model? Is there an Eastern or Southern encyclopedia model? | neutral | model |
| 8 | 1 | B | Given the "expert insights", do we believe that teenagers are intended to be the primary users of Wikipedia? Perhaps we should develop a project that would be targeted to youth? | neutral | teenagers |
| 9 | 1 | A | Wikipedia should broaden its range to make it more lively by increasing the role of videos & integrating with other wiki projects. | supportive | videos |
| 10 | 1 | B | Wikipedia and Wikimedia could have their own social media accounts specifically aimed at the younger generation. | supportive | social media |
| 11 | 1 | A | We could have a comment section where non-Wikipedians can discuss issues and make suggestions to improve the article, as is done on YouTube | supportive | comment |
| 12 | 1 | A | Modularize articles into parts that can be more easily read. Improve peer review to recognize good article. Assign editors more suggested targets. Strengthen rewards or professional editing to bring article series into completion. Connect to real identities. | supportive | concrete |
| 13 | 1 | A | Launch Quickpedia, a companion version of Wikipedia which would give a mobile-screen-full of condensed information with links to associated quick access information and to Wikipedia articles for deeper discussion. | supportive | Quickpedia |
| 14 | 1 | A | We could have flow charts showing where the information comes from tracing that back not to the cited sources but all the way back to the ultimate origins. | supportive | verifiability |
| 15 | 1 | A | Educate Wikipedians to insert some kind of microformatting that would make the information available on demand for some application or gadget. This idea points to a database-oriented solution and a tech-oriented team that would cooperate with specialists of various areas. | supportive | database |
| 16 | 1 | A | Delete the sentence in the "what Wikipedia is not" policy that says "The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter". | supportive | teach |
| 17 | 1 | B | Wikipedia can't deliver information in a manner that is accessible, understandable, engaging for everyone at once. We can ensure that the information is accurate, and partner with other organisations who deliver it to various audiences. | supportive | delivery |
| 18 | 1 | B | The Wikipedia website is difficult to navigate as a reader or seeker of information. More thought is needed about the organisation and display of information. | supportive | navigation |
| 19 | 1 | A, B | The Wikimedia community needs to strengthen it's mobile strategy. | supportive | mobile |
| 20 | 1 | A, B | More active use of social media for Wikimedia users and content creators to exchange information and share. | supportive | social media |
| 21 | 2 | C | To meet this challenge, each Wikipedia community would need to agree on specific definitions for "non-traditional" sources that would be considered reliable and what kind of content those sources would be reliable for. The only other real world option would be to have some articles or sections be editable only by people with validated authority. | concern | reliability |
| 22 | 2 | C | Having information published in books, magazines, and newspapers isn't a Western, white, rich, or educated norm. It's a reliable norm. | concern | reliability |
| 23 | 1 | B | The fact that children want to read poorly-sourced information should not incentivize us to stoop to their level; handing them poorly-sourced lies because that's what they want. We need to stick to sources. | concern | sources |
| 24 | 2 | C | It is impossible to have these three aims: (1) anyone can edit; (2) reputable reputation; (3) published reliable sources are not needed. | concern | impossibility |
| 25 | 2 | C | For topics such as cultures with oral traditions where published sources are unavailable, the WMF might consider a separate project with different aims and procedures. | supportive | separate project |
| 26 | 2 | C | Concentrate on finding ways to improve and broaden access to sources – at the moment, most of us are dependent on the internet and resources which have been digitized, and those are biased towards the Western world. | supportive | access |
| 27 | 2 | C | This is explicitly out of scope. The cynic in me says the outcome of this consultation has already been predetermined and/or the comments here will be selectively quoted. | concern | outcome |
| 28 | 2 | C | Why do we need to capture the sum of all knowledge when we will not even check whether that knowledge is true? We can choose to be "culturally inclusive", or we can choose to be "truthful and accurate". | concern | truth |
| 29 | 2 | C | The production or documentation of original knowledge is the job of researchers, and we as a community are not well equipped to do that job for them. Lowering our standards of evidence to attempt it would only compromise our core purpose. | concern | purpose |
| 30 | 2 | C | Perhaps you could look at making grants available to scholars who are compiling non-written and/or difficult to access knowledge. | supportive | grants |
| 31 | 2 | C | In order to legitimize an "oral history", experts would need to interview people to come up with a societal view of their own history. Even then, you still wouldn't know whether that history was actually true. | concern | truth |
| 32 | 2 | C | Unless we want to ruin Wikipedia, this is absolutely unacceptable to accommodate. One can, however, think about a dedicated sister project. | neutral | separate project |
| 33 | 2 | C | Oral histories are rarely if ever accurate testimonies of events in the past, but rather change and adapt to suit the needs of the story teller and their environment. | concern | oral histories |
| 34 | 2 | C | WMF could consider funding scholars in third world universities to collect oral data and publish it. | supportive | grants |
| 35 | 1 | B | There will need to be more live helpers at the Reference desk, and the format will need to be streamlined more for phone viewing. | supportive | mobile |
| 36 | 2 | C | There are high existing standards for archiving oral historical sources; it's possible to develop a separate project that follows these standards and makes more content available for wide distribution and for sourcing encyclopedic content. | supportive | standards |
| 37 | 2 | C | Beyond the main namespace, there could be "essay-space" to provide wider coverage of topics. | supportive | namespace |
| 38 | 3 | E | Invest in AI-led audiovisual content generation. | supportive | audiovisual |
| 39 | 3 | E | The answer is the same as the answer to challenges 1 and 2. We can generate and maintain high quality based on reliable sources. | neutral | reliability |
| 40 | 3 | E | It would be helpful to have a tool to compare page text to sources and warn if text keywords were not found in sources. | supportive | verify |
| 41 | 3 | E | Among the techniques which have slanted perceptions, there has been use of exaggerated coverage of some topics. | supportive | proportion |
| 42 | 3 | E | Any artificial intelligence agent which is allowed to edit, will need a combination of skepticism and supervision (human and/or automated). | concern | AI |
Detailed notes (Optional) edit
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