Wikimedia Discovery/RFC

Creating this as a request for comments page so that we can have broader discussions and participation about where Discovery can head next

= Incorporating New Data Sources =

During 2015 the Discovery team added OSM as a new data source for our editors on WikiVoyage to both display and use maps to surface Wikipedia content. We've seen a very positive response from the base tile set of cities/neighborhoods/countries/etc and recently we've also added transit location like ferries, boats, etc. Going forward we'd like to think about if there are more data sources that we can make available to our community to better surface and add to our articles.

These could include (but in no way are a complete/comitted list):
 * Books from Archive.org
 * Trending articles
 * Public Census Data
 * Improving GeoData coverage
 * Relevantly licensed public content

We can see at least two approaches to this kind of content. The first would involve adding these data sources to our existing elastic search index while the second would surface these data sets similar to OSM and reference them as it made sense. We want to be very sensitive to not bias our users experiences with any kind of content and allow our communities to help steer this.

= Public Curation of Relevance =

Currently all relevance calculations are done as a black box through elastic search. We'd like to explore a relevance model where WikiData could be used as a component of our relevance calculations. This would not only leverage the high quality data in WikiData but could empower our communities to affect relevance calculations rather than letting algorithms do all the work. As with any system that allows user contributions we would have to be very sensitive and cognizant of anyone gaming the system.

= Improving existing multi lingual / project search =

[REVIEW EXISTING 2015 WORK]