Wikimedia Product/Perspectives/Experience/Contributors

Summary
In order to reach our 2030 knowledge equity goalit will be necessary to increase and diversify the pool of people contributing to the projects, to expand the modalities of engagement and to open the door to new types of content that can be contributed. That is, it must be possible for the next wave of contributors to provide raw text, speech, images, video and other multimedia formats; to contribute new data in a structured way; and to perform discrete editing tasks to improve existing content. This next wave of editors must also be empowered with the tools necessary to storify (assemble and add context to) the raw content uploaded by others. And finally, the next wave of contributors must be able to create short form content (e.g. parts of articles) as well as rich articles.

Wikipedia is currently a reading and editing tool, but in the next three to five years these experiences must be separated and optimized for their purpose. In this near term future Wikipedia will become a reading and recruiting entry point (driven by search traffic, and reinforced by citations across the internet) while another more purpose-built experience will be created to better serve the contributors’ experience. This new experience must focus on better supporting the myriad of tasks related to uploading, labeling, editing and monitoring contributions.

Resources
C. Boyd, 2018 The Past, Present, and Future of Speech Recognition Technology https://medium.com/swlh/the-past-present-and-future-of-speech-recognition-technology-cf13c179aaf

D. Y. Lee, 2012 User acceptance of YouTube for procedural learning: An extension of the Technology Acceptance Model https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002229

W. Knight, 2016 Powerful speech technology from China’s leading Internet company makes it much easier to use a smartphone https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600766/10-breakthrough-technologies-2016-conversational-interfaces/

Z. Nethercutt, 2018 We’re Primed to Be Addicted to Social Media https://zandercutt.com/2018/09/18/were-primed-to-be-addicted-to-social-media/