Guillaume Paumier

Tags	Alternative Interfaces, Knowledge as a Service, Knowledge Equity, New Users
Primary Session	Advancing the Contributor Experience
Secondary Sessions	Knowledge as a Service

The strategic direction that has emerged has two components: "Knowledge as a service" and "Knowledge equity". "Knowledge as a service", which focuses on infrastructure, seems like the one most related to technology, This proposal is about exploring the less obvious intricacies between the two components, and in particular the technology implications of Knowledge Equity.

As a complex socio-technical system, it's not really possible to separate people from technology when talking about Wikimedia. A direction of Knowledge Equity invites the contributors of the Wikimedia movement to take a critical look at themselves and assess their biases and privileges. This, in turn, can help identify structural biases that have been reproduced and ingrained in our technical platform.

For example, MediaWiki is currently doing a great job at providing a localized interface in many languages. However, beyond language, interaction design and UX patterns seem very specific to Western culture. Similarly, when our strategic direction talks about building strong and diverse communities, this invites us to consider whether the current tools available to contributors enable them to provide an environment where newcomers can experiment, be mentored, and fail safely.

Beyond software, little effort has been invested in exploring alternative interfaces beyond the connected browser. Our primary interface for contribution (the web site) may work well for middle-class contributors from Europe and North America, but isn't necessarily what enables people from other backgrounds or geographies from contributing.

These are some of the topics I would like to bring up for discussion at the Developer Summit.