Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 3/Prioritize Topics for Impact
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This is an archive for draft recommendations. Visit Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations to read the final recommendations. |
Connection to other recommendations
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This recommendation proposes the idea of ascertaining priority regarding topicals needs according to varying contexts. It is supported by the recommendations: ‘Evaluate, Iterate and Adapt’, ‘Promote Sustainability and Resilience’ and ‘Create Cultural Change for Inclusive Communities’. |
For this, we must track and understand how we impact knowledge consumers’ lives, prioritize initiatives and areas of content so as to maximize that impact, and build the capability to protect it when necessary. This shift requires a transformation of our culture and practices in the way we evaluate the content and the creation of supporting tools.
Why
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Our ultimate reason for curating and sharing knowledge is to empower people to improve their lives. Yet, we do little to understand when and how that happens.[2] Without understanding why people need the knowledge we curate, and how well we are helping them to succeed at those goals, we cannot prioritize how to make our content accessible, understandable, and useful for them.[3] We cannot compare initiatives focusing on different articles or areas of content. But, we know some topics can provide much more personal and societal value to knowledge consumers and are relevant to a much larger audience. We lack the detailed know-how and tooling to prioritize processes for that insight. A solid understanding of how our content is used and abused, and a willingness to act on it, is necessary for staying relevant in a dynamic technological and social environment,[4] where information is consumed universally, and adversaries ranging from lone spammers to nation-states are interested in distorting it or preventing access.[5] Failure to emphasize our impact and relevance discounts the potential of free knowledge and can have repercussions on the sustainability of the Movement. By ignoring those differences when we prioritize our work, we are not fully recognizing the impact we could have, nor actively managing the responsibility it brings. |
How
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To prioritize efforts on topics aiming at having an impact on the world, we recommend an approach based on several actions. The evaluation of our impact must include assessment of how well we support knowledge equity so we can focus our efforts on the communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege,[6] and address global challenges (such as those described in the Sustainable Development Goals).[7] At the same time, we must acknowledge the human and financial sustainability of the Movement as a necessary prerequisite to long-term impact (even if priorities differ in the short term). Remembering that we are in it for the long haul, strategic choices that enable or protect future impact must be prioritized over immediate impact. Furthermore, we need to respect our long-standing principles of welcoming everyone who shares our vision of free knowledge, and their free will to contribute to any topic while respecting content neutrality guidelines.[8] The ability for a participant to bring their knowledge to the world is empowering. We must continue to support editorial control and opening new pathways for all stakeholders to prioritize content according to their specific wants and needs. To better understand how we empower people to improve their lives, we must invest more into research on how our content gets used (and misused). To be able to evaluate it at scale, we need to build human and technical capacity for measuring impact.[9] That includes measuring the coverage, quality and verifiability of content, detecting threats to it with significant potential for real-world harm (such as misinformation or scams),[10] and measuring the public’s trust in our content and their ability to access and understand it.[11] Prioritizing topics[12] or content with larger impact requires special focus on certain topics, tracking their completion, dissemination, and impact. For this, we must change our practices and improve metrics, reporting, evaluation, prioritization, advocacy, and partnership practices so that they can help differentiate between different areas of content based on their capacity for world impact.[13] We also need to make sure that our volunteers have the time to work on content by supporting them in administrative and organizational tasks that compete for their free time. We must identify the high-impact areas where content is missing or insufficient, and look for ways to fill the gaps.[14] This involves community initiatives, outreach, grants and other funding, partnerships, and exploring future technology trends such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.[15] In environments where both editors and content are missing (or content is known to be biased), advocacy and capacity building about content creation and neutral writing must be a priority. Regional support structures could play a pivotal role in this. |
- Conduct research and analysis to provide a clear list of topics that have the greatest impact on the world and on knowledge consumers’ lives.[16]
- Establish the tools and know-how necessary for evaluating and tracking content and its potential and actual impact at a detailed level.[17]
- Organize discussions to improve our shared understanding among different Movement stakeholders of impact, principles, and the effective ways to measure it.[18]
- Assess geopolitical risks which impact our content across different projects to minimize the effects of misinformation.[19]
- Support volunteers working on high-impact areas in activities that indirectly affect time dedicated to content generation, such as capacity building and community organization.[20]
- Develop processes and relationships to work with specialized partners who can assist in prioritizing topics.[21]