Reply to wiki-research-l only:

   I found Lila's speech had three powerful images: a dark-complexioned young girl holding a mobile phone, the innovation diffusion S-curve, and the phrase "you're welcome". Altogether they demand us to think hard about the path to "every one". 

   Most of us, as the early adopters (or even the innovators) of the Internet and open knowledge movement, should prepare ourselves to say to the potential new users: "You'e welcome." Before that, we need to do something to win well-deserved thanks.

   The S-curve innovation diffusion theory provides some methodological starting points to classify user groups in a culture/society, which could be a country, a demographic segmentation, a platform-based users, or the whole humanity. 

   Some literature of innovation diffusion used by high-tech product marketing professionals identifies the challenge to be the diffusion from the early adopters (visionaries) to the early majority (pragmatists), or from the diffusion rate of 16% to 50%. This diffusion phase is supposed to be the fastest-growing period. 

   What I found in the diffusion of Internet in mainland China was that Chinese Wikipedia was *forced* to miss out the the fastest-growing period of 2006-2008 (See    http://goo.gl/4n9MId). Thus I will argue that Wikipedia as a website cannot afford to miss out cultures/societies that are experiencing internet population growth from 16% to 50% (or alternatively 12.8% to 40% if the full internet penetration rate is expected to be lower at 80%). 

   One practical research implication for researchers like us is that we cannot be satisfied with survey research on the current users of Wikipedia or other Wikiprojects (Such research is still important though). That is NOT "every one" in Lila's speech. We might need to lobby other more general social science survey projects like the World Internet Project (http://www.worldinternetproject.net/#members) to include simple survey questions such as online encyclopedia usage or user-generated content. 

   This alone of course is not enough to indicate how the development path to "every one" can be done. Also, I believe there are other better research ideas that hold other possibly more important missing pieces. In any case, as researchers we need to be imaginative, methodological and empirical on the target of "every one".

Best,
hanteng


2014-08-09 22:32 GMT+01:00 Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com>:
Hi all,

I would like to encourage those of us who may have missed Lila's keynote speech at Wikimania to listen to it. [1] In her speech, Lila takes a long view of Wikimedia's history and future. She talks about incremental and disruptive changes that are happening socially and technologically such as the shift toward mobile and wearable computing, and the use of technology in the developing world. She also talks about modes of contribution, and changes inside the Wikimedia projects that would encourage more people to participate actively.

Thanks very much, Lila. I look forward to seeing how the trends and opportunities that you describe are addressed in our new strategic plan.

Pine

[1] http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/saturday2014

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