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Submissions/Beyond editing: Sharing in the sum of ALL human knowledge on mobile

This has been marked as a Withdrawn submission for Wikimania 2015 because it has been withdrawn by its submitter. The submitter is invited to consider trying again next year.

Submission no.
3024
Title of the submission

Beyond editing: Sharing in the sum of ALL human knowledge on mobile

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission
  • Maryana Pinchuk
  • Leila Zia
  • Ryan Kaldari
  • Moiz Syed
E-mail address
  • mpinchuk@wikimedia.org
  • leila@wikimedia.org
  • rkaldari@wikimedia.org
  • msyed@wikimedia.org
Username
Country of origin

USA

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

While 97% of all edits to Wikimedia projects come from desktop computers, only 65% of our readership comes from desktop, and this number is decreasing. More and more people are using mobile phones and tablets primarily or exclusively to access Wikipedia. With shorter average browsing sessions and devices that make long-form text entry difficult, these readers need new ways to contribute to our content that are appropriate to their devices and environment.

This presentation showcases WikiGrok, a new framework for mobile contributions that is empowering more readers to share in the sum of all human knowledge. This presentation is divided into three parts addressing the following questions:

  1. How can mobile users add value quickly and easily on the go? Creating new contribution features requires rethinking some past assumptions about how contributions can or should work. Mobile users spend less time per session browsing our content, and mobile devices provide less room for complex instructions or multi-step workflows. To account for this, the new mobile contributions we are piloting are designed around specific, simple calls to action that are structured and minimize user error. We want to reach beyond the pool of innately motivated editors and encourage people who don't think of themselves as Wikipedia experts, are intimidated by editing or markup, or simply don't have time to learn the rules and policies of Wikipedia – and give them an easy and safe way to add value.
  1. How can we ensure that the quality of new contirbutions is high? Learning from past experiments in reader engagement, we wanted to avoid features that generated a huge number of contributions but led to more quality assessment and curation work for the existing editing community. Instead of relying solely on human curation, we experimented with tools like automated suggestion and aggregation – pooling many users' contributions before submitting – to ensure high quality.
  1. What kinds of tasks can readers do? We started with simple questions about Wikipedia that could turn free-form text articles into structured data for Wikidata, to see if we could leverage the intellect of the millions of visitors who come to the mobile site. There are many more lightweight tasks to pilot and test, we will discuss future directions here.

This project was designed mobile-first, but the lessons learned can apply to all our users. We want everyone – whether they're just coming online on mobile or have been reading Wikipedia for years on desktop – to be able to add value to the sum of human knowledge, in many different ways and on many different devices.

Track

Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
30 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Possibly

Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests


Interested attendees

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  1. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 12:40, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. CT Cooper · talk 17:31, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Ocaasi (talk) 16:43, 2 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Dario (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:38, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]