Strategic Priorities: Improve quality

Wikimedia's flagship project, Wikipedia, empowers people to learn about whatever they want. Wikipedia succeeds because it is huge and comprehensive: it has information on practically every topic imaginable. But when Wikipedia does not have information on a topic, or our information is incomplete or inaccurate, we must do better.

Wikipedia's coverage is skewed toward the interests, expertise, and language skills of the people who created it. For example, our coverage of biographical and pop culture topics is very strong,^[1] but our coverage of Africa is quite weak.^[2] We offer much more information in German than we do in Hindi.^[3]

Global participation is key to breadth and completeness. We need to encourage global participation via partnerships with universities, cultural institutions and other groups who align with our mission. Outreach efforts by local Wikimedia chapters and community members will help. The processes, tools, and policies that manage and organize our work also influence the quality of the end product. Therefore, the Wikimedia Foundation will prioritize improving tools for collaboration, quality review and labeling, as well as new tools to enable readers and experts to aid in the assessment of information quality. Beyond simply increasing the breadth and completeness of our coverage, we must drive toward a measurable increase in the quality of information we offer.

We want to help readers understand what they are getting by providing them with information quality labeling. We also want to provide clear and responsive channels for readers to report quality problems, and get them investigated and resolved.

“

The number one social need of human beings is the need for approval. The Wikimedia Foundation can (and should) use this to its advantage, and besides, every nonprofit organization should have a recognition program for volunteers. An award designed and bestowed by WMF would motivate volunteers to move mountains.” User:Noraft

”

Through 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation will:

Support our volunteer community through technology improvements to article assessment, by community members, readers and experts.

Develop improved tools for near real-time assessment of information additions and changes by experienced Wikimedia community members.
Systematically collect input from readers and subject-matter experts to perform both surface and depth reviews of the largest possible number of articles.

Provide support to the Wikimedia movement in the development of institutional partnerships and alliances.

Provide project funding for efforts to connect Wikimedia projects with the work of institutions of culture and learning.
Give global visibility to these efforts through our communication channels.  
Develop and maintain documentation of best practices, blueprints, standards, and metrics associated with institutional partnerships.

Provide excellent service to our audience through clear quality labeling and the development of highly effective response systems.

Develop clear and concise quality labeling to support readers.
Support development of first-responder systems that empower community volunteers to consistently and effectively address hot-button issues.

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Note:

This is a version of the final, Board-approved summary that should not be edited - if you have any comments, please share them here.

Footnotes

↑ For more detail, see: Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. (2009) What’s in Wikipedia?: Mapping Topics and Conflict using Socially Annotated Category Structure. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Retrieved from: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers.html
↑ A review of the prevalence of geotagged Wikipedia articles showed most of Africa contained less than 1,000 relevant articles while the United States had over 88,000. For more detail, see: Graham, M. (2009) November 2009 Wikipedia article dumps. Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved from: http://zerogeography.blogspot.com/2009/11/mapping-geographies-of-wikipedia.html
↑ The number of Wikipedia articles available to the 550 million people whose primary or secondary language is Hindi is less than a half of one percent of the number of articles available to German speakers, whose population is a third the size. Findings were developed with statistics from stats.wikimedia.org and Ethnologue. Stats.wikimedia.org (2009) Wikipedia statistics. Retrieved from: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm (accessed August 2010) Lewis, M. Paul (ed.). (2009). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. SIL International. Retrieved from: http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size#3 For more detail, see: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_penetration#Wikimedia_penetration_by_language

[1] For more detail, see: Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. (2009) What’s in Wikipedia?: Mapping Topics and Conflict using Socially Annotated Category Structure. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Retrieved from: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers.html

[2] A review of the prevalence of geotagged Wikipedia articles showed most of Africa contained less than 1,000 relevant articles while the United States had over 88,000. For more detail, see: Graham, M. (2009) November 2009 Wikipedia article dumps. Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved from: http://zerogeography.blogspot.com/2009/11/mapping-geographies-of-wikipedia.html

[3] The number of Wikipedia articles available to the 550 million people whose primary or secondary language is Hindi is less than a half of one percent of the number of articles available to German speakers, whose population is a third the size. Findings were developed with statistics from stats.wikimedia.org and Ethnologue. Stats.wikimedia.org (2009) Wikipedia statistics. Retrieved from: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm (accessed August 2010) Lewis, M. Paul (ed.). (2009). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. SIL International. Retrieved from: http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size#3 For more detail, see: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_penetration#Wikimedia_penetration_by_language

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