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Op-Ed

Wikipedia in the age of personality-driven knowledge

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By Maryana Pinchuk
Maryana Pinchuk is the Wikimedia Foundation's Principal Product Manager, and has been a Wikipedian since 2011.

In March 2023, I helped organize a Zoom call to discuss external trends that may impact the Wikimedia movement, and over a hundred Wikimedians attended to talk about the opportunities and risks of generative AI. But a different concern also surfaced that really surprised and stuck with me. Longtime English Wikipedia editor Ragesoss noted that when observing how his children like to learn things online, he saw that instead of going to websites, they sought out personalities who had built large followings on platforms like YouTube, and could provide information from an authentically human point of view. In the year since that AI call, the English Wikipedia community has heatedly debated how to respond to the opportunities and threats of generative AI. But this other trend – of people (especially younger people) seeking out personalities to aggregate knowledge for them, on social platforms that make it easy and rewarding for contributors to participate in new formats like short video – hasn’t been discussed as much. And while some Wikipedians may wonder what any of this has to do with encyclopedic content, I believe that this trend deserves as much attention and conversation in our community.

Despite the excitement (and hype) around generative AI in the press over the last year, Wikipedia is still used by more people globally than ChatGPT.[1] But, when looking at Wikipedia usage compared to usage of popular social platforms frequented by young people, the comparison is far less favorable for us. TikTok has close to two billion monthly global users – twice as many as Wikipedia – and is still growing.[2] And while it's tempting to dismiss TikTok and apps like it as entertainment platforms where young people only share and watch lip-syncing and viral dances, consider that a third of US people under age 30 recently reported regularly getting their news from TikTok, and one in four US TikTok users say they come to the platform for educational purposes like learning history.

Meanwhile, recent surveys by the Wikimedia Foundation Brand Health team have shown that worldwide, people aged 18–24 report being less aware of, less likely to use, and less likely to recommend Wikipedia to a friend than older age groups. Many of these younger audiences report preferring to get information via video platforms like YouTube or social knowledge sites like Quora. Traditionally, young people have always been a huge staple of Wikipedia readership. What could account for fewer young people than retirees today saying that they use or are even aware of Wikipedia's existence, and more going to social apps for educational content?

I think it's important to look outward at what's happened in the world in the last decade to better understand these data:

  • There has been a proliferation of places where people can share and seek information online. Older platforms (e.g., Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit) have been joined by newer competitors (e.g., TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Discord) – competing not just for people's time and attention, but also for contributors who can make the most engaging, viral user-generated content. People with knowledge to share now have many choices for where and how to share their knowledge (whether that's text, long or short video, or audio). Successful creators can reach huge audiences quickly and can expect significant monetary rewards, so they are incentivized to produce highly engaging content on a variety of topics, including educational or edu-tainment content.
  • How people interact with knowledge online has also changed. Millennials (my generation) were in their teens or early 20s when the first smartphones debuted, so most of us still had to use a laptop or desktop computer with a keyboard and web browser to explore and participate online. To learn or share information, we had to read or write it. In contrast, 18–24-year olds today were small children when the smartphone revolution hit, so their first online experiences likely happened on a touch screen, via mobile apps that require no interaction with web browsers or Google, and little or no typing. They also haven't known a world without user-generated video, and their first experience learning or sharing knowledge online was likely not a website but a YouTube video.
  • Lastly, expectations for what "knowledge" must look like, online or offline, have changed. Millennials are the last generation to grow up routinely seeing physical encyclopedias in the home or school. I have been told by instructors in Wiki Education, who work with classrooms of US college students, that today's students have to first be told what an encyclopedia is, before being introduced to the concept of Wikipedia. These are college students in one of the wealthiest, most knowledge-privileged countries on the planet, but they've grown up in a world where traditional learning methods and resources are, like everything else, also rapidly changing in response to technology.

Given all these changes to how people expect to get information online, what opportunities does Wikipedia have to continue to meet the needs of this younger generation and generations to come?

I think there are a few strategies we could pursue.

One strategy, which I’ve heard expressed by some Wikipedians, is evolving what our content or projects looks like, to better fit some of these new expectations and preferences. There are different proposals for how to achieve this that have recently been proposed and discussed on the Wikimedia-l mailing list: for example, should we provide the ability to create and include more interactive elements (like graphs, timelines, or quizzes) on Wikipedia articles? Should we produce and include video explainers of important topics on Wikipedia? Though the specifics differ, fundamentally these ideas are about making Wikipedia more of a “knowledge destination” that younger audiences will want to visit – to read and to contribute to – instead of going to places like TikTok or YouTube. But when this conversation came up at WikiConference North America last fall, I heard many Wikipedians express concern about where pursuing this strategy could lead us. There was fear of making Wikipedia into something it isn’t. There was also fear about the cost and risks of building big new software features and trying to compete with massive for-profit technology companies for users. I think all of these concerns are very valid.

Some alternative strategies might instead focus on:

  1. Making sure people continue to get reliable information from Wikipedia, and that they understand what Wikipedia is and that they can join our movement, no matter where they like to share or receive information online. This “free knowledge everywhere” strategy seems promising to me because creators on YouTube and TikTok already routinely harvest facts, ideas, and images from Wikipedia and include them in their videos (and it's possible that in this way, information from Wikipedia is already being viewed by more young people outside of Wikipedia than on it, in the formats that they prefer). However, Wikipedia is rarely credited or acknowledged in these videos, so audiences have no way of knowing about the amazing volunteer project that brings them this information for free, let alone that they can join in and contribute. One way to change this might be to make using our new sound logo a more consistent practice whenever Wikipedia knowledge is shared externally.
  2. Evolving the habit that has been so standard among people of my generation when reading or hearing some claim that sounds dubious: opening up a new tab and checking what Wikipedia has to say. This strategy is about seeing if we can continue to make Wikipedia the "Internet's conscience" – i.e., the knowledge commons that provides additional context; organizes secondary sources; and gives ordinary people the ability to see, participate in, and influence the consensus on what is known – while adapting to the fact that "opening up a new tab and reading longform text" might not be the way younger audiences use the Internet anymore. One way to do this might be to provide instant verification with Wikipedia wherever people are getting information.

My team at the Wikimedia Foundation, Future Audiences, is exploring these different strategies, and our mandate is to evaluate them with quick experiments (including an experiment to build and test that last example, just-in-time third-party information verification with Wikipedia). But we are not the only ones within the Wikimedia movement who are interested in better understanding and showing up in this space: Basque Wikipedians have been turning Wikipedia articles into short videos for YouTube and TikTok as well as adding them back to Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia UK chapter has recently started their own TikTok channel.

I would love to hear from more Wikipedians: what role could Wikipedia play in this new personality-driven knowledge era? What new strategies seem most promising (or not) to you? What aren't we as a movement talking about or doing that we should be?

Notes

  1. ^ English Wikipedia alone was viewed about 7 billion times a month in 2023 by about 800 million unique devices, while monthly global ChatGPT visits were estimated at about 1.5 billion from about 180 million monthly users as of fall 2023.
  2. ^ TikTok and Instagram are fast-growing social apps and are projected to have 3.5 billion global users by 2025.
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  • Without advertising revenue, there is no monetization. Talent for those personality driven things will go elsewhere, thankfully. We have personalities here also BTW, but they are only watched for entertainment purposes in places like Wikipediocracy. -- GreenC 23:08, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Technology Report in this issue discusses a security issue that has essentially caused graphs to stop working in Wikipedia. Other technological "improvements" may carry the same risk.
That Signpost feature also points out how few articles actually have interactive or other fancy graphs - a clear indication that "build it and they will come" isn't always true, particularly for an all-volunteer content creation process.
As for the current situation: as the article pointed out, creators on YouTube and TikTok already routinely harvest facts, ideas, and images from Wikipedia. If our goal is to push out accurate information, as opposed to getting Wikipedia as many page views as possible, then YouTube and TikTok use of Wikipedia may be worth giving more encouragement, not reacting with despair.
Finally, I think the most important metric is how many active editors we have, and how much editing they do. If that turns negative, then we have a very serious problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:29, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, those Youtubers I watch already cite Wikipedia or even show it on screen occasionally. That is a practice we should encourage and make easy: Always cite your sources!
Proper attribution should be standard behaviour and easy, when reusing Wikimedia content. As of today, there is still much UX design and metadata cleanup work to do in this regard, cf. e. g. this recent blogpost. HHill (talk) 11:53, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@HHill and @John Broughton: Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts! @John Broughton: I think you're spot on in your summary here:

If our goal is to push out accurate information, as opposed to getting Wikipedia as many page views as possible, then YouTube and TikTok use of Wikipedia may be worth giving more encouragement, not reacting with despair.

Our mission has never been to drive clicks to a website. It is to share the sum of human knowledge, and if this knowledge finds its way to people in new ways, I think that should be celebrated. But as @HHill points out, attribution is an important ingredient in ensuring that Wikipedia knowledge is shared sustainably – without any paper trail back to the concept of Wikipedia as the source, a) it's hard for viewers to know if any given YouTube or TikTok video is full of carefully checked facts harvested from Wikipedia or... not, and b) over time, the awareness that Wikipedia is a place where reliable knowledge is collected may fade from people's consciousness. And with fading awareness that Wikipedia is a website you can read, we may indeed start to see declines in people who experience the magic of discovering that Wikipedia is a website they can edit...
A few years ago, some colleagues and I worked on this attribution guide intended for 3rd party content reusers, but I'm interested in hearing any thoughts or ideas you have about how to approach attribution in a way that gets it to stick – because asking people to read and follow a guide only goes so far. I'm also very curious to see if we could create that magic "I can edit!" moment wherever Wikipedia facts/information get reused (but also very mindful of the careful balance between being more open/inviting to new users and not overburdening the existing community with cleanup work). I'm inspired by the work of my colleagues in the WMF Growth team (e.g., structured safe-to-try tasks) and am thinking about how some things like that might show up in places like TikTok or YouTube. Your thoughts/ideas on either of these topics (attribution, off-platform contributions) would be very appreciated! Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While it's great that there's a guide for this, I honestly doubt the vast majority of content reusers know it exists. From where I'm standing, I think the problem with non-attribution comes down to a few factors:
  1. Most people aren't even aware of our license, let alone its requirement to attribute. Even new (or sometimes seasoned) editors copying content within Wikipedia need consistent reminders that they need to provide proper attribution. Without displaying our license more prominently, people aren't even going to know about it, let alone care.
  2. Almost as a rule, Wikipedia is seen as a monolithic entity where content just exists, not an easily-editable platform that thousands of thousands of real people put time and labour into. You would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at the amount of times I've told people I'm a Wikipedia editor, and they didn't even understand that was a thing that existed. If it's seen as just a thing and not a collection of people, then many are going to think it's fine to lift (or even plagiarise) from.
  3. Maybe I'm not informed enough on this, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't see enforcing its license as an issue worth pursuing. If our license requires attribution, but there are no consequences (no matter how minor) for not providing attribution, then many unfortunately aren't going to see it as necessary.
  4. This is something I actually saw the YouTuber hbomberguy bring up in his recent video about plagiarism (which highlights a couple cases of YouTubers plagiarising Wikipedia): reusers that lift content without attribution almost invariably see the people they're exploiting as beneath respect, they're not going to attribute our work to us because they don't see us as worthy of attribution. It is sometimes shocking to me how much contempt is levelled at Wikipedia editors and our work by different parts of the internet; many people see our work as worthless, so why would they bother pointing out that they got their information from a platform they consider so contemptible?
I don't think any of these are unfixable problems, although the last one may be a lot harder to fix as it requires broader cultural changes. In fact, I think the first three have solutions that we can do in house:
  1. Display the CC license more clearly on more pages (not in small print at the very bottom of the page), make it even harder to miss that there are clear terms outlined for reuse of our content. The only place I'm regularly confronted with the terms of licensing is on pictures on Wikicommons, and even then it is very easy to miss.
  2. We need to do better ourselves at properly attributing the work of our users. Right now, if I want to find out the authorship of an article, I need to click on "View history" (which many don't know exists), then click an external link to a separate website, then scroll down to see the authorship in terms of percentage and characters. In contrast, Britannica prominently lists the primary authors of its articles underneath the article title, with secondary contributors also being displayed prominently in the history. Make it clearer that there are real people behind these articles and who they are, and this'll contribute to more people understanding that there are real people doing this work and they deserve attribution.
  3. We should probably have a form set up where users can submit information about their work being reused without attribution, so that the Wikimedia Foundation can pursue the issue. I've tried being direct with content reusers about attributing the work of Wikipedians/Wikimedians, whether through emails or comments, but it doesn't work, they usually just ignore such messages. So we really do need the force and resources of the Foundation to help us with this. We should be active in collecting data on content reuse without attribution, leaning on reusers to provide attribution and pursuing them further if they continue unapologetically breaking the terms of our license. It should be made clear to reusers that reuse without attribution isn't just wrong, but has potential consequences.
These are just my thoughts on the matter, which I've been mulling over for quite some time. (I think I started thinking about this sometime last year, after I saw my work getting plagiarised twice in one week) I understand they may not all be workable, to others' liking or if this is even the right venue for bringing this up. I just really wanted to get all this down in writing. Apologies if I've gone on for too long about it. In any case, I think off-wiki reuse without attribution is a major issue that needs addressing, and I'd be happy to see more done on that front. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:50, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Grnrchst thank you for sharing these thoughts, and it's so painful and sad to hear how uncaring some reusers can be about taking the hard work of Wikipedians without given them proper (or any...) credit. This is definitely something I and my colleagues care a lot about. IANAL, but my understanding is that we're in a complex and tricky spot to approach this topic from a legal POV, for the following reasons: the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't "own" the licenses used on our projects (the license terms are specified and maintained by Creative Commons) and we certainly don't own the underlying content (which belongs to the original authors). Furthermore, the CC license terms on attribution are flexible by design, to accommodate unforeseen types of reuse (i.e., via new technologies or new creative applications) – but that flexibility makes it harder to argue why something is/isn't reasonably attributed. So, my (non-lawyer) understanding is that pursuing legal action against every reuser who doesn't attribute correctly would be quite resource-intensive, and we would have to balance an investment in WMF Legal staff time spent on this against other important matters (like trademark infringement, Terms of Use violations, etc.).
For all the above reasons, I wonder if taking a different (i.e., more of an awareness/marketing) approach could be both more effective and more cost-effective at getting reusers to attribute – i.e., showcasing the existence of our editing community and highlighting how to do attribution right via popular social channels, doing more to promote the importance of reuse among the tech sector, etc...
Would you mind if I put you on my mental list of Wikipedians to reach out to as I and others at WMF think about how to do some interventions in this area? Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@MPinchuk (WMF): Thanks for the response, I understand my suggestions may not be workable, was just spitballing because I think something needs doing. And aye feel free to reach out at any point. :) --Grnrchst (talk) 11:12, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "BY" requirement of CC BY-SA doesn't kick in if you're just citing or paraphrasing Wikipedia. And featuring the usernames of contributors more prominently would be incompatible with WP:OWN. Anybody who contributes to Wikipedia should expect they will get no credit for their work.
I see no problem with content creators not crediting Wikipedia. If they referenced Wikipedia for their research, what I want from them is to verify the claim with the sources cited in the article they read and then credit those sources, not to credit Wikipedia, which we all know is not itself a reliable source. Nardog (talk) 08:33, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly disagree that crediting contributors has anything to do with ownership or rewards (in particular I take issue with the idea that proper credit is a reward and not basic decency). In fact, neither of those articles you link to mention anything about authorship credit. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:20, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Grnrchst: I agree with you on the question of rewards; WP:DNER was the wrong essay to cite, especially since it's primarily an essay about on-wiki rewards. (IOW, don't expect Wikipedia to reward your editing with special privilege.) That doesn't apply here.
However, I largely agree with Nardog on the question of crediting editors more prominently — how does that even work, when a typical article is the collective product of hundreds if not thousands of individual contributors? What makes someone a "primary author" of any given Wikipedia article? How would we even decide?
"source: Wikipedia" IMHO satisfies both the ethical and moral obligations of the project license. (I won't comment on legal obligations because IANAL.) Asking people who reuse Wikipedia content to name-check everyone with a Wikipedia account who's ever tweaked the article's punctuation feels not only unworkable, but counterproductive. And personally, I don't see it as in any way necessary, when it comes to my own contributions. Others' opinions may, of course, vary. FeRDNYC (talk) 17:44, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see how DNER is inapplicable here (on-wiki rewards are just some of the rewards it discusses, not the only kinds), but if you say so, there are also WP:YANI, WP:NOTYOU, and WP:DGAF. It's not a novel or obscure concept. Nardog (talk) 10:39, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you're a content creator and your only source is a Wikipedia article, then you have a moral obligation with your audience (and perhaps with society at large) to disclose where you got that information. But unless you're redistributing the whole or a part of the article verbatim or adapting it beat by beat, you have neither legal nor moral obligation to credit individual contributors. We document facts, and nobody owns them. Nardog (talk) 04:41, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Grnrchst: I actually made a quick video about some of the stuff you are talking about with regards to Wikipedia and Hbomberguy. :P –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 00:39, 14 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think we should be clear that WP has had an easy seven or eight years ride, from the period of the fake news panic. The reason being that WP took to heart why its curation c.2006 was inadequate, and spontaneously did something about it. It is not clear that there is an existential threat credible enough to move communities to react at the content level. That said, concision, illustration and verification need to be working "everywhere all at once", and there is no reason that readers should not be offered different views of the same article content. Charles Matthews (talk) 14:02, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can not follow the reasoning in the article. We are not in a popularity contest, but our task is to provide correct knowledge, and I see no threat to this our mission. In 1518 there was a battle that was the start of the modern kingdom of Sweden. In was weekly documented and has been used heavily in propaganda under 500 years, and even in modern time there has been an article about every second year publishing different speculations. After a proper Wikipedia article was published 10 years ago, all speculation articles have stopped and on local heritage sites, earlier full of speculationstexts, there only exists a link to this article. And the number of reads steadily increases. No tiktok discussion will start an alternative truth over this battle. (sv:slaget vid Brännkyrka)Yger (talk) 17:39, 30 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I rather agree with most of the above comments. The article does not make a persuasive case for the TikTokisation of Wikipedia, for the good reason that the process would be a disaster: at best, a waste of money, its results to be removed from view and the waste swept under the carpet; at worst, the widespread contamination of a perfectly good functioning encyclopedia, which happens to be nothing like today's latest fashion, nor yesterday's forgotten super idea, nor tomorrow's passing fad. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:19, 31 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Chiswick Chap: Thanks for reading! I definitely am not arguing for the TikTokisation of Wikipedia, for all the reasons you mention here. I do think there is an argument to be made (and some in the Wikipedia community are actively making it; see the discussion on the Technology Report in this issue) that we need a bigger investment in more modern, rich-media experiences on Wikipedia (i.e., that we should create software tools to allow Wikipedians to make interactive content like graphs, maps, timelines, videos, etc.) in order to keep up with the modern Internet. I can see the potential benefits but also many potential risks and costs. What I tried to get across here is that there is another way to look at this space, which is more like the Wikipedia-ization of TikTok. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I read about the "more modern, rich-media experiences" with the queasy feeling you may imagine. Having replied here, I didn't feel like writing a repeat item, signed Professor Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. The potential benefits are quite limited from the point of view of an encyclopedia; we already use a variety of media in articles, and in their place they are helpful. Having Ms Attractive Personality "explaining" the Big Complex Topic ("Now then children, we don't want to talk down to you today, but") is not going to be a good idea. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:36, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I echo the above comments, in that I'm not sure there's a problem in more entertainment/personality-based content getting more attention. This has always been the case, it's not like Encyclopaedia Britannica was more popular than television programmes or tabloids. What concerns me isn't that TikTok and YouTube are more popular than Wikipedia, it's actually something that this article slightly glosses over: that "Wikipedia is rarely credited or acknowledged in these videos" when it is used as a source. I'm sure I'm not the only editor that has seen their work fed back to them by 'content creators', who never bother even crediting the source, let alone its author. What we should be focusing on is not competing with completely different mediums of information production and distribution, but figuring out a way that we can better integrate with these platforms in a way that doesn't exploit our labour. Attribution is a very important part of our license, so we should be asserting it more. If TikTokkers and YouTubers credited us, I wouldn't have a problem with their videos being more popular than our articles. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:05, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Grnrchst: Thanks for reading! I absolutely agree that new mediums of information production could be valuable allies (not competitors) in the sharing of free knowledge, but that attribution is key to making this work. See my comments to User:HHill and User:John Broughton above. One interesting thing I've learned from talking to content creators is that some of them do attribute their sources because they feel it helps them gain more credibility with their audiences, but they tend to cite the sources used in Wikipedia rather than Wikipedia itself (for a variety of reasons, but one of them being that they seem to have internalized the scolding of that one schoolteacher who told them citing Wikipedia is bad). I wonder how/if we might change that... Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 21:55, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't mind the idea of Wikipedians creating videos to put in Wikipedia articles as an addition or summation of an article or section. There's lots of issues there, similar to our audio recordings, and might work better for some fields than others (I'm especially thinking technology, engineering, and mathematics). Such videos could even create a certain level of "personality" to an explanation that our text-heavy website tends to avoid (just through editing and design choices; I'm imagining a flat text here). This is the kind of thing I have been thoroughly enjoying Youtube for for nearly two decades now and I think there is value here. Creating such videos is a lot of work, however. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 07:08, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for your thoughts @Maplestrip! It is a lot of work to make a good educational video (I've dabbled with this a bit myself), but I think even more importantly:
    • New policies/guidelines would have to be created and agreed to by the Wikipedia and Commons community about what can and can't be included in videos, how they should be reviewed, where they can and can't be added, who can make/appear them (i.e, COI), etc.
    • New incentives would likely also need to be created (also probably via policy changes, like the creation of a Featured Video process or something). The kinds of people who are very good at making educational videos have some pretty substantial incentives (i.e., money, brand sponsorships, fame, etc.) to make this content on/for YouTube, TikTok, etc., and not a lot of incentives to make freely-licensed content and donate it to Commons – especially if it's not even guaranteed to show up prominently on Wikipedia.
    I don't think these are insurmountable challenges, but imo they're just as important to consider as the technical hurdles, and they rely solely on the motivation and desire of Wikipedians to come together and figure this out. As @John Broughton mentions above, we can't assume that "if we build it, they will come." Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 20:35, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@MPinchuk (WMF): Videos are indeed a lot of work, which I can confirm from my own Youtube work. At this point I've spent months on single videos, but those videos do tend to be fairly long (ten minutes +). I don't have any incentives to make those videos, as I am not making any money whatsoever on Youtube with my skills. One or two-minute explainers on Youtube would be a lot simpler to make, perhaps even less work than doing a full-article audio recording (and we have surprisingly many of them). Technologically, I don't think we need to implement anything new; Commons video would already work sufficiently. I am realizing this concept sounds more like a Wikiversity thing than a Wikipedia thing, but I do think this kind of thing falls within our existing policies, similar to making explainer graphics. If someone takes the lead, who knows. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 06:24, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello Maryana! I've been following the work of Future Audiences because I think it's important for us as a movement to answer the question on "How do we keep Wikimedia projects relevant for the future". However, I do want to point out that this personality / authority issue is not a new one. Whenever I've interacted with academics and tried to convince them that they should contribute more to Wikipedia, the main obstacle that they've faced has been that they do not get credit for the work they do on Wikipedia. Unlike writing an encyclopedic article for, say, a special edition of a contemporary encyclopedia of China by Routledge, Wikipedia offers them nothing in the social currency that academics exchanges with (and I'm also using this example because I've seen how much some of these big publishing houses pay academics for such endeavors -- pennies; it's not a money issue what is at stake here). This is a personality / authority / credit issue that we've had since probably the inception of Wikipedia (it's kind of its birthmark!), but I'm concerned that we're asking this question because of the way in which the current media ecosystem overemphasizes personalities above everything else. I'm all for giving more credit to editors -- particularly those editors that contributed to this platform and have done things like, idk, inventing the optic mouse or contributed to IPCC reports -- but that's not what you're referring to, and I don't see how the rest of the arguments follow the "personality theory". Also, why do we keep comparing ourselves to social media platforms like TikTok? Again, I don't see Routledge or Encyclopedia Britannica comparing themselves to Pinterest. We're not on the social media business. We don't cater to the same audiences that Routledge or Britannica do (and I understand that), but there are so many assumptions that would be worth unpacking on how we are imagining those "future audiences" to be and look like. It sounds like this work is only highlighting young people from the US with a heavy media consumption (a very particular demographic). Why haven't we asked ourselves the question about serving entire populations that don't even know how to read in a heavy written environment? Countries like Mali or South Sudan have around 30% of literacy rates, with the most affected being women (source). UNICEF estimated in 2022 that only a third of 10-year-olds could actually comprehend a simple written story (source). Why are not those "future audiences"? It is also a known fact that global population is in a declining trend, with global fertily rates being below the replacement level (source), which means that the 18-24 age bracket might look very different in 15 years from now (2050 looks like years ahead but really in generational terms that's just around the corner). How do we respond to those changes? Again, I like the work that Future Audiences is doing, but I wish there was a more open conversation that doesn't only answers to the fears and concerns of the US tech sector, and that actually help us live more into our values. Scann (talk) 23:13, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It could be nice to be able to easily identify the primary author of an article in a sort of byline, in cases where "primary author" applies, which is not infrequently. Within our community, some people have made a name of themselves by writing incredible articles in specific fields, but our users are unlikely to ever know there's a specific person behind those articles. I'm sure there aren't tons of issues with this concept tho. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:53, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Scann: This is a very well-timed comment, because I'm working on setting up some time for a conversation just like this in the coming weeks with the LATAM community Look out for more information soon...
    TBC, I'm not comparing Wikipedia to or encouraging it to become more like TikTok – what interests (and worries) me is that TikTok and other platforms like it are becoming entrypoints to getting information online for many young people – not just in the US, but globally (my understanding is that TikTok usage rates are heavier in some parts of Central and South America than in the US). These platforms could amplify/supplement the knowledge and content in our projects... but they could also cut off awareness and entry into our very web-based free knowledge ecosystem. If we ignore them entirely, we do so at our peril.
    Since Wikipedia was created, we've relied heavily on web search engines to make people aware of and bring them to our projects. I think it's fair to say that without the fortuitous and not-at-all inevitable situation in the early 2000s of Google prioritizing longform text resources like Wikipedia in search results, Wikipedia would have stayed a small hobby project for Jimmy and a few of his Internet friends. If new social apps like TikTok are replacing web search, and/or if more and more young people no longer turn to long-form text resources (but instead to video, social Q&A sites, podcasts, etc.) to get information, we risk losing a good chunk of this younger generation and those after it as future readers and contributors. Those are the future audiences I'm concerned about.
    Like you, I don't consider our mission to be fulfilled if Wikipedia remains known to and used only by an increasingly small population of affluent, digitally-literate, highly-educated elites. I'm hoping that more people from more parts of the movement start to talk about how we can truly fulfill our mission of bringing free knowledge to everyone in the world, anticipating that people and the world will change over the coming years and decades. I also agree that software can't be the entire solution to such a complex socio-technical problem; Future Audiences is just one tiny part of this picture, but it is by no means meant to be the only vehicle for innovation within our movement. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 20:17, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I want to return to the issue of whether "more modern, rich-media experiences" are in fact desirable. They may be what audiences want (in part), but if we have problems just holding level with the number of active editors - editing text, consider the difficulties of attracting editors to do rich-media work. Or, probably more importantly, to maintain and update rich-media work. Consider if new information makes a video slightly wrong. Who is going to reshoot that video? And if not the original author, then how does the (different) editor deal with changing narrators in mid-video? Or consider a rich-media graph - who updates it, year after year, so it stays current?
One of areas of Wikipedia that I worked on from 2006 through 2008 was U.S. Congressional elections. Since then, I've seen a very significant drop-off in this area - lots of Congressional elections have no articles, or minimal articles, and biographical articles are often not updated with more recent election results. And this is essentially text-only. Why do we think that editors would flock to Wikipedia if it offered (more) rich-media editing, particularly since we essentially offer no (visible) credit to authors. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:25, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We almost (edit conflict)'ed saying basically the same thing
See my response to @Maplestrip above. I agree that this is a very important set of question:
  • Do Wikipedians want to do this kind of work (make/triage videos for Wikipedia), and/or are there people outside the current Wikipedian/Commonist pool who would want to join our communities to do it?
  • How can we test that in a lightweight way, before investing tons of time and money into new technical solutions that may or may not see sustained uptake?
I came up with the idea of a "Featured Video" project OTOMH above, but that would be one potentially very interesting signal –  i.e., if there were a critical mass of motivated Wikipedians who wanted to sift through existing Commons media and/or make new videos and pilot this as a new WikiProject dedicated to finding and adding videos to more Wikipedia articles, that would be very cool! Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We could leave updating of some graphical content to folks like Our World in Data and simply pipe their amazing material in. (Basque)
For video we have VideoWiki which is an automated system that builds videos from mediawiki based scripts. This makes updating easy (when the tool is not broken). Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:33, 16 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • There has been a (limited) experiment with short explanation videos over at dewiki, it didn't go down too well (main discussion was at de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Kurier/Archiv/2020/01#Funk, see de:Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Broadcast/Dokumentation for context). There are plenty of lower hanging fruit to pursue, before embarking on something similar, I think. I remember hearing about problems with uploading videos on Commons, have those been solved? And why is a site like https://lizenzhinweisgenerator.de/ still necessary, shouldn't our own software offer this service in an easy and obvious way? I wouldn't be too surprised, if some of the related bug reports go back at least to the introduction of the Wikipedia:Media Viewer. We will need those software changes anyway, especially in an Age of AI, I believe. And as for articles, I do not think, those people using Wikipedia as a tool to find sources worth citing and not mentioning Wikipedia itself in their videos are a problem. Something similar was (and hopefully still is) true for common printed reference works, everybody at least somewhat experienced knew them and used them but for information found everywhere deemed it unnecessary to explicitly cite them. But for those articles worth citing, it would be useful to have a way to get their bibliographical information easily into a Reference management software, with their authorship information. Over at dewiki plenty of the better (e. g. good or featured) or more obscure articles are mostly the work of a single person. Some outreach would clearly be useful, who searches for a PDF on Commons for (re)using Wikipedia content, without knowing about its existence? Maybe it is worthwhile partnering with experienced and influential institutions or people on TikTok, Youtube etc., who share at least some of our goals, to create useful and entertaining videos on how to properly use and reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia content. And while we are at it, why not also some teaching research skills and digital literacy more generally? --HHill (talk) 08:50, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Time to have Wikipe-tan become a VTuber? Cooljeanius (talk) (contribs) 10:57, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I am thoroughly amused by this idea and would wholly support it as somesort of project on Youtube. Wikipedia as a vector for entertainment externally is cool :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 12:59, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • For the attribution/linking back to the source of information issue, an easy first step would be to come up with a standardized attribution text that can be generated with one click and displayed prominently somewhere on each page, specific to that page. Then, an awareness campaign to promote its usage elsewhere. Axem Titanium (talk) 22:27, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]


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