User Interaction Consultation

Reading problem
Learning on Wikipedia is declining (as measured by pageviews, which are an admittedly bad proxy, but the only proxy we have)

Solution set
New experiences based on interaction with content and other users will help a new generation of  Reading overall problem: Learning

Idea: Create a community of readers. New experiences based on interaction with content and other users.

Hypothesis: Reference use case is being disinter-mediated, and we need to explore new engagement models. Specific to community of readers is the hypothesis that there is a wide swathe of readers between casual and encyclopedia article writer that would like to interact with knowledge. We are building together the sum of all knowledge and making it available for everyone. We are availing knowledge, yet, we are not enabling everyone to learn about their topic of interest through the knowledge we are building. The reading team is exploring new ways to make learning knowledge easy through Wikipedia, and we need your help.

Background:
As part of the reading team's attempt to be better Wikimedia citizens, and in response to feedback from community members, we are trying to discuss product development with our stakeholders earlier and earlier in the development process. Rather than throw a feature out and ask for feedback, we are conducting an experiment in which we discuss the problem we are trying to solve for our readers and ask you to submit potential solutions and offer feedback on those ideas.

Reading overall problem: Page views are declining.

Idea: Create a community of readers. New experiences based on interaction with content and other users.

Hypothesis: Reference use case is being disinter-mediated, and we need to explore new engagement models. Specific to community of readers is the hypothesis that there is a wide swathe of readers between casual and encyclopedia article writer that would like to interact with knowledge.

In other words, google is cutting us out and giving users reference information right in search results. To remain relevant we need to provide more than a reference. Readers still want more than what google search results have to offer. Looking at user behavior on other products, we think they are likely to engage with content and each other. We already provide this exact thing with editing and moderating others' edits. But we think there are additional engagement models that have much lower barrier to entry, that is similar to other products.

We want to ask the community if they agree with this hypothesis, and if they have suggestions for ways to solve this.

Instead of starting out with proposals specific to wikipedia, we could list examples of engagement models.
 * upvote / like
 * share
 * follow story or topic
 * rate / review
 * highlight
 * curate / organize into lists
 * comment
 * ask questions
 * thank the creator
 * follow creator

Already submitted ideas:

