Nathan,

All,

I wonder if Google maintains provenance for their “snippets” and whether developers and platform teams would be interested in requesting an API which includes features such as subscribing to pings (daily, weekly, or monthly) reporting usage data pertaining to derived data. The envisioned pings would say something like: 10,000 users this month asked questions which were answered by snippets derived from your content at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams .

Brainstorming about the future of mobile computing and multimedia educational content, you might be interested in interactive video – video with menus (like Netflix “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, “Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale”, and “Minecraft Story Mode”). A tool for creating these videos is available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/makerbox/tools/storyformer . In my opinion, interactive video is better for educational content than video.

You might be also interested in a new project proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikianswers  .

Best regards,

Adam

From: Nathan
Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 7:14 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Are we losing our readers?

I think a lot has been said on this list over the last few years about a couple of major factors that probably still play a role:

* Shift to mobile device usage and how that affects Wikipedia usage and pageview stats

* Availability of more and more "snippets" in search engine results, which often makes it unnecessary for someone to click through into an article

My own sense is that the prevalence of snippets and smart search results is growing rapidly, I often skip clicking through to Wikipedia if my question is answered by Google.