Dear all,

Hope you are well and safe. 

I am thrilled to reach out to you on behalf of the Communications Department at The Wikimedia Foundation to share information about a new short-term test campaign through which we hope to learn more about engaging Indian digital audiences, primarily the youth. 

Emerging from the Medium Term Plan, this test is aimed at strengthening the awareness levels of Wikimedia, our free knowledge mission, and growing affinity with our readers in India, especially the youth. 

Firstly, let us introduce ourselves- The Communications Department.

Communications is a Wikimedia Foundation department. The Communications Department performs a variety of functions for the Foundation, such as building awareness of Wikimedia and its projects,  maintaining relationships with the media, producing content for the Wikimedia Foundation website, managing the community blog Diff and Wikimedia social media platforms, facilitating communications with Wikimedia communities, informing research into emerging global audiences, developing creative materials, and coordinating campaigns to engage new audiences for Wikimedia projects like Project Rewrite and Wiki Unseen.

What is #KnowWithWiki all about?

This is a truly integrated effort where members of various teams within the Foundation came together to develop a plan to engage young readers in India in a manner that demonstrates the value of Wikipedia, highlighting the role it already plays in helping them know their world better and promoting free knowledge.

The problem: Wikipedia readership in India is high. It is currently ranked #4 in website traffic in India with an average of approximately 2 pages a visit. Unfortunately, according to a market research carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, only 31% of the Indian internet users have heard of Wikipedia, and strikingly, only 26% of internet users aged  18-24 years were aware of Wikipedia. The gap between usage and awareness indicates that there is a large number of young people who use Wikipedia and are not aware of us and therefore have no affinity or value for it.

Why India?

Engaging young internet users and unaware Wikipedia readers to increase affinity and perceived value is key to the sustained growth of Wikipedia and all our projects. The Indian youth may be viewing or using our content through different platforms e.g. seeing Wikipedia content through search engines, but there is a lack of awareness among this audience that this information comes from the efforts of our diverse volunteer community that spends time and effort in curating relevant and reliable information on Wikipedia and its sister projects. 

We wish to engage with this very audience by providing them more relatable examples on how Wikipedia plays/can play an active role in their efforts to gather fact-based, researched information around worldly topics. Furthermore, by capturing and studying data emerging from this test, we will be able to learn, assess and improve our future engagements in the country

Our Plan

Starting May 2022, we will be engaging Indian influencers under a campaign #KnowWithWiki & “Know Your World Better”

For this activity,  we are collaborating with selected popular GenZ influencers to showcase the relevance of Wikipedia among the younger Indian audience in their daily lives. The primary platform of activation will be on Instagram, which is a platform that has the highest number of users from India, and has emerged as the most preferred social media platform2 among Indian youth according to a 2020 study3. Instagram influencers will highlight use of Wikipedia in their posts on topical content and social awareness topics. 

These influencers will release their own content on their Instagram handles covering topics relevant to our target audience, while seeding references of Wikipedia and the vast knowledge available on the online encyclopedia. 

This will be complemented with our own social media channels sharing content around the experiment, focussed towards the Indian audience. The general public would be encouraged to follow and participate in the campaign online using #KnowWithWiki. 

Why are we doing this?

This activity follows the the successful completion of a similar activity in South Africa- #WikipediabyUs, where we collaborated with South Africa’s young creative community by giving them a platform to create informative content based on Wikipedia articles. #WikipediabyUs, demonstrated young creatives using Wikipedia to expand a topic of interest with their audiences. 

It is a part of our sustained endeavor to make deeper strides in learning from different contexts on improving understanding of the Wikimedia movement and its projects. We want to raise awareness about how Wikipedia and the free knowledge movement is present in the daily lives of Indian audiences.  

This test would also enable us to tackle some of the misconceptions around Wikipedia in the Indian digital space, via explaining how the Wikipedia volunteer community creates and improves content on the platform based on up-to-date, relevant and verifiable sources. 

By engaging the 18-24 age group we aim to-

• GET GenZ adults aged 18-24

• WHO read Wikipedia

• TO see Wikipedia as relevant

• BY showing them how often they call on us to know and do more

How can you get involved?

You can create your own content on social media to describe how you use Wikipedia in your everyday life to know your world and the things that interest you better. Make sure you use #KnowWithWiki and #Wikipedia to add to the campaign impact!

If you would like to know more and get involved or share any suggestions, please reach out to me by email.

Thank you warmly for your time and interest.

On behalf of the Core Team- Khanyi, Mathoto, Olga, Rachit and Vidhu.

--

Khanyi Mpumlwana (they/she) Creative Director Wikimedia Foundation *Please excuse any brevity or typos, messages are often sent in a hurry

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