Architecture Repository/Artifacts/Enabling strategic product goals with architecture patterns

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Shows how modern architecture patterns enable the strategic product goals

Status: v1 released September 2021

Introduction
This document shows how modern architecture patterns can enable the delivery of new products that align with the strategic product goals.

We’ve included examples of experiences from products that can be enabled by the new systems architecture patterns and concepts. The examples follow the Product Strategy points, as potential narratives of products that will empower our users to contribute through these strategic perspectives.

Architecture patterns
An architectural pattern is a general, reusable approach to a commonly occurring problem in software architecture within a given context. The patterns in the sections below enable the system to be flexible, reusable, and to answer modern technological needs so that we can achieve our strategic goals.

Conclusion
A paradigm shift into the consumption of knowledge

This document presents a set of architecture patterns and illustrates how these patterns enable new product experiences. The system changes produced by these patterns correspond to a paradigm shift, bringing Wikipedia (and sister projects) into alignment with future technologies.

In our changing technological landscape, consumption of knowledge has evolved away from consuming information as a complete web page to consuming structured, relational fragments of information that can be consumed according to the context. They can be presented sequentially in the context of a full web page, but they can also be consumed separately, as "pieces" of information that are related by contextual links.

As an example, we can see some of that behavior existing in today's internet consumption of our data. For example, Google's sidebar only presents a piece of the lead paragraph of a Wikipedia article, and Alexa and Google Home only speak out pieces of specific relevant sections that answer the question posed to them. The idea of dividing the information into "pieces of knowledge" gives editors the power to control how content is reused regardless of context.

The internet is already starting to treat our vast database of knowledge as distinct pieces, but the decisions about how those pieces look and who controls their content and context are outside of our control. By reconsidering our content as pieces of information (that can live as an article, or as distinct context-related pieces, whatever that may look like) we can reclaim control over our information, and empower our communities to do what they do best -- contribute valid factual information to the sum of all knowledge, to be consumed by modern technologies properly.

Next steps
Add product examples to the narratives section of the Architecture Repository!