Research talk:Knowledge Gaps 3 Years On

Feedback

What do you think about the updated roadmap for Knowledge Gaps Research? Would you like to see anything different? Anything that should not be there? Share your thoughts!

Countering systemic bias?

Putting this delightful work in context: How does this line up with different existing projects to counter systemic bias in content, coverage, and contribution? –SJ talk  16:13, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Macro-scale gaps

We have large gaps, measurable in entire knowledge-formats, fields, and exabytes, which doesn't seem to make it into these analyses.

• Formats: there are dozens of major classes of knowledge (tabular data, blueprints, video) that are largely excluded from our projects based solely on format.
• Fields: there are highly specialized subfields which are largely excluded from our projects, or explicitly rate-limited, based on their specificity. (e.g. Omics, astronomy, climate science, bibliometrics, pop culture)
• Bulk data: there are large in-demand knowledge archives that have never been integrated with our projects, in whole or in summary, for a range of reasons. (including bulk releases from GLAM institutions, archives of all sorts that get captured less granularly as Internet Archive collections, &c)

Where do you see these fitting into your future analyses? –SJ talk  16:13, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Some remarks, ideas

The Knowledge Gap project is mainly focused on technical tools, AI. But the community itself, as a human group, is not involved so much in the process. Some remarks/ideas about making our knowledge-sharings projects more human to welcome new and different people and hold these publics :

Identify (based on Taxonomy 2nd Draft) - identify some of the barriers preventing people from accessing free knowledge.

-> these identified barriers are mainly technical What about psychological barriers ? Did you investigate with tools like the MBTI for example, if some personalities are more frequent amongst the contributors and some never become contributors on our projects ? If there is psychological gap, perhaps could we shape the trainings and the contribution processes to allow a larger scale of personalities to participate to the knowledge sharing process.

Measure - One of the end goals of this taxonomy is to help Wikimedia communities measure the impact of their initiatives and content creation. With this in mind, when possible, we explicitly formulated gaps and objectives to incorporate elements that are quantifiable in a globally-consistent manner via surveys, large-scale data analysis or other computational methods

-> I believe it would be honest and important to publish every year an index of gender parity amongst the contributors. Nearly all figures and researches about parity in Wikipedia's communities are old and not updated. It is also important to know if nothing works of if the situation gets worse.

Creativity - Having a model that reflects Wikipedia’s processes could be useful to answer questions about knowledge gaps...

-> Wikipedia is complex (so discouraging) and has a lot of constraints (so unpleasant). One idea would be to model Wikipedia in a creative way (by a design thinking process). This can be done by a simple mapping of a Wikipedia article, transposing then the mapping in a metaphoric object (Wikipedia, and if it were... a boat, a town, a garden, a kitchen..) and use the prototype to detail Wikipedia's main functions and features.. Such a simple prototype is pleasent and gives the reward to readers or future contributors in a training that they can understand at a glance a complex structure like a Wikipedia article.

Thanks for reading. Waltercolor (talk) 09:34, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Waltercolor for this feedback!

• Re Identify: this is a great suggestion, and I think we should discuss whether "Personality" should be included as a gap (because we want everyone no matter their personality to be able to contribute) or a barrier (because some personality traits prevent people from contributing to the projects). We had a similar discussion around "Technical Skills", as a dimension who could be interpreted both as a gap (because we should create equal possibilities to everyone, no matter their technical skills), or as a barrier (as lack of technical skills might prevent people from contributing), and we ended up including technical skills as one of the gaps.
• Re Measure: the Community Insights survey provides an yearly view on contributors' diversity in terms of geography and gender. Our plan would be to incorporate some of this information in the knowledge gap index as we extend our measurements beyond content, to readers and contributors.
• Re Creativity thank you for your suggestion! If you have any pointers or references to similar processes, I will share them with the rest of the Research team!

Miriam (WMF) (talk) 09:04, 5 April 2023 (UTC)