Katherine Maher
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This proposal focuses on the "Knowledge as a service" part of the strategic direction.
When I look at the core of what we do, to some extent I see a model that we've mastered, and that we're making incremental improvements to. My concern is that, while that model is incredible and powerful as a community, the model for the interface and the delivery mechanism for the product the community creates are changing, and for us to continue what we're doing today may or may not prepare us for what the future actually looks like. I think it also limits our ability to unlock all of the tremendous knowledge, unstructured and structured, that exists within our projects. And I also believe that it limits us to certain forms of knowledge and a certain hierarchy of creation in a way that is very inward-looking.
Right now much of our information is sitting, unstructured, in a SQL database, rendered through PHP, read through a rendering engine into a browser to read/write in one interface: the browser. While this is amazing for the world of the browser, we're not going to be a browser-based information world for that much longer, any more than anything else. It's not that the browser is going to go away, the browser will be like books: books haven't gone away, radio hasn't gone away, but there will be a transformation to a new interface, and we need to be ready for it. Perhaps we should actually backfill into those older interfaces that we're not currently part of, because people still use those interfaces, and those interfaces are valuable.
Essentially this is about taking the Model-View-Controller paradigm to the next level, and also about extending it to participation and to the "write" part of our read-write system. Even if Alexa is serving Wikimedia content outside the browser, there is no mechanism for contributing trough Alexa. We need to be planning for an architecture of information and architecture of experiences that is independent of the browser.
How do you get the most value out of the existing content? How do you serve a snippet to someone who just needs a quick answer? How do you serve different layers of sophistication to 8th-graders versus the college graduate, versus the PhD? Can we engage in the knowledge ecosystem and leverage what we have as a platform, and our traffic distribution and awareness, to actually open up greater resources of knowledge?
These are some of the topics I would like to see discussed at the Dev Summit.
