Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded an exploratory grant of $250,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Discovery department [1], in order to conduct research and prototyping to improve how people discover and engage with information on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

The Discovery team has begun six months of research and prototyping, with the goal of building better experiences to help people discover knowledge. You can learn more about the team’s work here http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/23/search-and-discovery-on-wikipedia/.

Our deliverables include:

- User testing and research on current user flows to understand the search and discovery experience - Creation and maintenance of a dashboard of core metrics to use in product development - Research on search relevancy and the possibility of integrating open data sources - Open discussion with the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors - Creation of sample prototypes to showcase discovery possibilities

The need to improve our search experience has long been recognized across the Wikimedia projects. We need better ways to help everyone discover the most relevant, reliable information on Wikipedia and its sister projects. For example, while people can search within one project (like Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons), they can’t easily search across the different projects. Some people still receive zero results if they search and do not include the right words in a search. There are open data sources that have the potential to improve how people find information, and that should be explored.

We look forward to discussing these projects with communities and anyone with an interest. You can collaborate with the Discovery department in the following ways:

- Subscribe https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery to the Discovery team’s public mailing list - Read about these projects and others at the MediaWiki Discovery https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery page - Reach out to the Discovery team on their IRC channel: #wikimedia-discovery on Freenode https://freenode.net/.

A press release and blog post will follow shortly, and more information in the form of an FAQ has been posted here [2].

Wes Moran, VP of Product

User: WMoran_(WMF)

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/KnightFAQ