Core Experiences

Core Experiences is a group of the Wikimedia Foundation product teams Web, Growth, and Editing led by Marshall Miller, Rita Ho, and Suman Cherukuwada. The challenges, plans, and projects of these three teams are interconnected. Being unified as product group allows us to achieve more together than we would separately.


 * The Web team focuses on people reading Wikipedia articles.
 * The Growth team focuses on people who are transitioning from being readers to being editors.
 * The Editing team focuses on the editing experience.

Together, the three teams trace out a journey of users going from being readers, to new editors, to experienced editors. By working together, we believe we can help more people go through that journey to become more deeply involved in learning and contributing to the wikis.

Guiding principles
''In 2022, our team members worked together to establish these guiding principles. They are meant to remain true about our group over the course of the following years. We want to make sure that the plans we make and the things we build stick to these principles.''

The experiences we build and evolve…


 * …primarily aim to enable new people and new kinds of people to take part in contribution and consumption
 * …encourage people to transition from learners to new contributors to community members, as far along as fits their lives
 * …nurture our sociotechnical system by encouraging exploration, creativity, and collaboration
 * …prioritize clarity and equity

In our work, we…


 * …build on the Wikimedia websites, while also seeking ways for free knowledge to be contributed and consumed off our platforms and in new formats
 * …build platform components to empower others to evolve the contribution and consumption experiences on their own
 * …partner with our communities to make decisions

Shared strategies for 2022–2023
''These are strategic priorities that our group set for the 2022 - 2023 fiscal year, and potentially beyond. "Pave the journeys" will occupy the majority of our time as our top priority.''
 * Pave the journeys: people on our websites are encouraged to progress in their involvement with the wikis, and they find clear pathways from learner, to editor, to community member and points in between.
 * Knowledge connections: Core Experiences group has ambitious hypotheses for 2023-2024 around future learning and contribution experiences.
 * Extensibility: new software is extensible so that WMF teams, affiliates, volunteer developers, and non-technical volunteers can augment, repurpose, remix, or configure to fit new ideas and local needs.

Projects

 * Web: Desktop Improvements
 * Growth: Newcomer experience
 * Editing: Talk pages project