Wikimedia Product/Perspectives/Culture/Content Gaps

Summary
Are we there yet? Making the sum of the world’s knowledge accessible to all the world’s people presumes that the extent of knowledge can be described, measured, and tracked. It also implies that content gaps can be identified and filled with context-relevant takes on the missing knowledge – this may be the most difficult part of the problem. For our purposes, gap knowledge can be said to fall into one of these general categories: potentially portable knowledge, contextually nuanced knowledge or contextually anchored knowledge. The three types require different intervention strategies, and may have different relative priority for a given a regional community. For this reason, intervention strategies (product features, global tools, community mobilization) must be developed in parallel. Solutions for filling content gaps also surface new challenges around notability and verifiability – how must current standards for authority need to evolve in order to encourage the growth of each type of gap knowledge? And finally, assuming that it is possible to close the content gap through various means, what support mechanisms will be required to maintain this body of knowledge? It will be necessary to have tools that monitor and signal the freshness of content to the community best suited to maintain it. In sum, making all knowledge available to all the world’s people demands the organization and participation of all the world’s peoples, and interventions deployed at pace with the rate of growth of the overall pool of world knowledge. [3]

White Paper
[link to paper coming soon]

Resources
L. Zia and N. Schaaf, 2015 Gapfinder https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder

L. Zia, 2017 Article Expansion Recommendation System https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2017

A. Halfaker R.S. Geiger, J. Morgan and J. Reidl, 2018 The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FzMCptTMOvvwRRGQPyh2AsBrGneOIG3F

2017 Movement Strategy Report: New Voices Synthesis  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/New_Voices_Synthesis_report_(July_2017)#How_to_attract_new_users