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Proposal:Can Wikimedia Become A 300 Million People Movement By 2020?

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

Wikimedia's projects combined have a global audience of more than 300 million visitors every month, according to comScore. About one among one thousand people makes at least a small number of edits and other contributions every month. In 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation formulated a "big hairy audacious goal": "To increase Wikimedia's educational reach to one-third of the planet's population by 2020, and to motivate every 10th reader to become an active participant."

Proposal

In the coming year, Wikimedia will engage in an open, collaborative strategy process to engage both the Wikimedia community and the world at large in helping to answer the question of what it takes to scale up our world-wide movement and our social impact. This presentation is intended to help jumpstart this longer term conversation.

In the presentation (see video) some steps were presented as recap:

  1. Fix what is broken
  2. Create new micro opportunities
  3. Create new larger opportunities
  4. Highlight both intelligently
  5. Become a social movement

Motivation

Such an audacious goal is intended to be a highly aspirational target. What does it take to massively scale up both our audience and our number of participants? This proposal is to explore strategies, with a focus on what it takes to convert a larger share of our global audience to become active participants in a world-wide movement for free knowledge.

  • A simplified editing workflow;
  • more obvious opportunities for people to contribute knowledge in various forms;
  • new types of activities that we can use to get readers engaged, such as article reviews;
  • improved multilingual communications;
  • a greater presence in the physical world through chapters, partnerships, and user groups;
  • technologies which help to empower people to participate who are currently able to even get online.

As a comparison, over a hundred million people login daily at Facebook, out of a quarter billion registered users in total. Facebook does something different than Wikimedia - but it does run a website where the number of people who actively participate is at least a magnitude higher than Wikimedia, if not two. What has Facebook on offer that attracts people which Wikimedia doesn't offer?

Key Questions

  • What does it take to massively scale up both our audience and our number of participants?
  • Is this goal audacious enough? why not by 2012?

Potential Costs

To be explored.


References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Can Wikimedia Become A 300 Million People Movement By 2020?.

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