Wikimedia Discovery/Knight FAQ/en

What is this grant for?
The Knight Foundation has awarded the Wikimedia Foundation an exploratory grant to research and evaluate ways to measure and improve search results on Wikimedia projects.

This is a restricted grant, and the funds may only be used by the Discovery team for the deliverables specified in the grant. This grant does not increase the team's budget for this fiscal year.

Links:
 * Joint press release - Knight Foundation web site, 2016-01-06
 * "Exploring how people discover knowledge on Wikipedia and its sister projects" - Knight Foundation blog, 2016-01-06
 * "Wikimedia Foundation to explore new ways to search and discover reliable, relevant, free information with $250,000 from Knight Foundation" - Wikimedia Foundation blog, 2016-01-06
 * Grant announcement - Knight Foundation web site, date unknown, identifying the grant period as running from 2015-09-01 to 2016-08-31

Who is the Knight Foundation?
The Knight Foundation is a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting media, journalism and fostering communities and the arts. As part of their efforts, they have previously given grants to the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikipedia Zero.

What are the deliverables?

 * User testing and research on current user flows to understand the search and discovery experience
 * Creation and maintenance of a dashboard of core metrics to use in product development
 * Research on search relevancy and the possibility of integrating open data sources
 * Open discussion with the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors
 * Creation of sample prototypes to showcase discovery possibilities

Overall: conducting research around search and prototyping for a more effective search experience.

What are the problems you are trying to solve?
People often use external search services to find Wikimedia and Wikipedia content. The problem is that people tend to go back to to the external service for additional searches, even though they're already on Wikipedia. The Discovery Department wants to create a better experience for the users of the sites by creating more accessible searching and discovery mechanisms than are presently available on our sites. There is also an opportunity to explore surfacing information from sister projects to enhance the discovery of that knowledge for projects that have less visibility. Lastly, the team is providing a foundation for product development that is data driven as well as user driven to iterate to the useful services and features our users desire and need.

What are you trying to understand?
The Discovery Department tracks four core metrics (also known as key performance indicators) for search:


 * 1) Zero results rate for search. If users receive no results, it means we've not been able to help find what they're looking for, so we measure the zero results rate.
 * 2) User engagement with search results. If users do not click on results, then we haven't given them the results they wanted.
 * 3) Search latency. The faster our search works, the better.
 * 4) API use. It's important that apps and third parties can search our site too.

You can see the full range of metrics that we track on the Discovery Department's search dashboard.

What happens afterwards?
The team and users will post ideas for deliberation, and will collectively come up with proposals.


 * Wikimedia Discovery/RFC

How will this affect other products that the Wikimedia Foundation is developing?
The research carried out will help bring more understanding to search and discovery mechanisms across all platforms, and user flows from readers to editors and will inform decisions made on how to improve those mechanisms on desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps, as well as in specific products like VisualEditor. We also are exploring API usage, best practices, mix of content from inter-wiki projects like Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons and more, and utilization of open data sources like OpenStreetMap to expand contextual knowledge discovery.

We will, of course, be publishing our research, so that it may be read and taken into account by the broader movement and other interested parties.