Inuka team

Introduction
Millions of people in emerging markets are coming online for the first time. It is imperative that our projects support and welcome new readers with access to knowledge that matches how they consume content on the internet.

The Wikimedia Foundation Inuka team (formerly New Readers product team) was formed in July 2019 as part of the Product department. The team's mission is to deliver compelling experiences to Wikipedia readers in emerging markets, driving increased adoption and retention of Wikipedia in areas where internet use is rapidly growing.

Why the name Inuka?
Inuka is a Kiswahili word that means "to rise". Our team's mission is to raise the relevance of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project content to readers in emerging markets who are not accessing it yet. We chose to use a name from a language spoken in a part of emerging markets, in Africa, as a way to remind us of the audience we want to reach with our product choices. It is aspirational, and reminds the team that everything we build or implement should be taking us towards the goal of raising worldwide readership.

Mission

 * Deliver compelling experiences to Wikipedia readers in emerging markets, driving increased adoption and retention of Wikipedia.

Team principles
Below are some of our team principles when designing and building products for people in emerging markets:


 * Build for mobile-first experiences
 * Explore new form factors
 * Short term
 * Multi-lingual
 * Global
 * Diverse
 * Emerging Markets centric
 * Content Enablers
 * Meet users where they are

Inuka team projects

 * Wikistories lets editors create short, visual and reliable knowledge from Wikipedia for quick consumption and easy sharing. It will generate content in visual format to capture and distribute encyclopedic knowledge that is less suitable for long form articles.  This new form of content contribution will take into account the constraints editors in emerging digital communities face when contributing content, and make it easier/more welcoming to contribute to knowledge successfully through mobile phones.

Wikipedia Preview allows Wikipedia content to be available as contextual information on 3rd party websites. Wikipedia Preview on partner websites would allow their readers to gain context while reading their pages and help people gain contextual knowledge from Wikipedia without necessarily clicking through to Wikipedia and learn more on Wikipedia with the option being available to read more on Wikipedia. Similar to page previews but for external sites. The code can be integrated into the site, or, if the external site uses WordPress, then they can use the WordPress plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wikipedia-preview/.
 * Wikipedia for KaiOS, a Wikipedia reading app for smart feature phones. Released in two versions, one for India and one for rest of the world. Short video of the app.

Design research

 * Wikistories Qualitative user research with clickable Wikistories prototypes in Indonesia with existing contributors gathered feedback from Indonesian editor communities on early concepts and designs for Wikistories, focusing on the experiences of potential Wikistories creators coming from the editing community
 * Qualitative user research with clickable Wikistories prototypes in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa with new/potential contributors investigated the behavior of content creators and consumers in three African countries with distinct user behaviors and context especially relating to Wikimedia.
 * Qualitative research in India to understand why and how these users use these phones. We learnt that users chose to purchase these phones because they're affordable and allow access to apps like smartphones do.  We also learned the challenges they face trying to read Wikipedia within the native mobile browser.  Challenges included ability to scroll through content, text size on the screen, searching for content and lack of awareness that Wikipedia content is available in multiple languages.

Follow our work

 * Monthly/quarterly updates Wikistories, Wikipedia Preview, and Wikipedia for KaiOS
 * What we are doing currently