Product Principles

Wikimedia Products should be...
1. Community-centric: enabling a welcoming, vibrant community place where people come together to create, share, and discover knowledge through positive collaboration.

2. Usable for all: promoting equity through usable, useful, and inclusive tools and services that meet the needs of a diversity of people and machines across user experiences.

3. Intentionally transparent: demystifying the knowledge creation process and encourage participation by giving everyone visibility into how information is created, verified, and improved over time.

4. Extensible and sustainable: creating the conditions for people and machines to use, reuse, and build on top of our platform, extending free knowledge and supporting a sustainable future for Wikimedia.

Why these Principles?
Wikimedia is a place, not a database: We believe that Wikimedia is and must remain a vibrant place on the internet. Welcoming spaces are vital to the work of building and maintaining the wikis. Providing readers a place to consume and engage with free information is more indispensable than ever. So, we must build tools that promote positive collaboration and vibrant knowledge communities.

Usability is an equity issue: These principles also rest on the contention that free software isn’t free unless it’s usable. If software is free-as-in-beer and open source, but you can't actually use it, it is not really free for you. We seek to make Wikimedia software highly usable and useful for people and machines. We will break down the software barriers that prevent participation while giving users the tools to control their own experience. In short, we will “make the simple things easy, and the hard things possible” for as many people as possible.

We must serve more than just facts: Finally, these principle rest on the movement strategies assessment that we play a vital but poorly understood role in the knowledge ecosystem. Our products will make knowledge literacy to be part of everyone’s experience of Wikimedia, exposing people to how information is created, verified, and improved, and encouraging people to participate appropriately.

Purpose

 * Define the kind of products and experiences we aspire to build
 * Distill a shared sense of purpose for the impacts, plans, technologies and tools that the department will create
 * Give leadership a chance to define abstract expectations for our products
 * Explain what we hope we’re doing here to other staff and communities
 * Not a strategy. Not a new direction.

Process

 * 1) Review predecessors
 * 2) Wikimedia is a place...
 * 3) Our products must… ¿empower?
 * 4) Exploding “empower”
 * 5) Framing in light of strategy
 * 6) Word-smithing with the Communications team