On 15 Feb 2018, at 19.36, Adam Wight
<awight@wikimedia.org<mailto:awight@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
Punk rock! These consultants seem to actually understand what we’re about, and the report
is a great collaboration all around. The heavy use of actual Wikimedians’ quotes lets us
tell our own story. The recommendations on page 31 look right to me personally, and are
“actionable”.
The recommendations are very good. Lately, however,
I have been thinking that maybe we in the Wikimedia movement should take even greater role
in the attempt to protect free access to knowledge? I am not sure if this is clear in our
current 2030 strategy.
For instance, we could invest in and increase the visibility of some other successful
Wikimedia projects, than the Wikipedia (and Wikidata).
Wiktionary is one of these. It is not very well known although widely used, especially as
a source for other services. This is simply because we do not have a easy to use UI to the
service. Webxicon.org<http://Webxicon.org> [1] is and example of a third party
service using the Wiktionary data. No doubt, it is more user friendly than our own
Wiktionary [2]. Designing new UI and promoting Wiktionary would also emphasise our global
nature and respect of different cultures and languages.
Another field were we could play a bigger role is the Open Educational Resources (OER).
Wikipedia is the world largest OER repository but there is also a need for free and open
digital school materials (previously known as textbooks) in all the languages of the
world. We have Wikibooks and Wikiversity to develop these, but again, because of their
poor usability they have not become THE places to create learning materials in large
scale. Services to create and share free and open educational materials, that are
replacing textbooks, could be one area to improved our products.
I am afraid that in the future there is more work to do in the field of free and open
knowledge, than what we are able to imagine today. Therefore, I think we should rather
expand than to focus on a single encyclopaedia — in practice to have more (great)
products.
- Teemu
[1]
http://webxicon.org
[2]
https://en.wiktionary.org/