Converting Western Internet to Indigenous Internet Lessons from Wikipedia
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Kul Wadhwa and Howie Fung Converting Western Internet to Indigenous Internet Lessons from Wikipedia With the massive proliferation of communications technology, it’s the first time in human history where the majority of people (more than 4 billion) have access to information through a mobile phone. But then we have to ask: What content? Who contributes? In which languages? How should it be presented? And in what ways should it be delivered? And, most importantly, what are all the pieces you need to put together to make this work? The only Internet project that has been able to scale globally is Wikipedia. Everyone involved with this project got behind the vision of “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” Starting in 2001, this community was initially limited to people that had desktop or laptop computers, access to the Internet, and a strong comprehension of one of the 10 or so major languages on the planet. Wikipedia has consistently ranked in the top 10 most visited websites on the planet,1 as a knowledge resource that is multilingual and available in over 280 languages.2 Not only is it open and free to use, anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles. Therefore, as a democratic platform for both contribution and dissemination of information, it makes sense just to leverage it for greater use in the developing world, where access to such resources are either underdeveloped or are largely unavailable. But what made Wikipedia successful can’t be exported “as is” to the develop- ing world. There are challenges that extend beyond the platform and into the real world, limitations beyond the project’s direct control—lack of adequate infra- Kul Wadhwa worked at Wikimedia from 2007 to 2014; his most recent position was Head of Mobile, where he focused on expanding Wikipedia into the developing world. He’s currently Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Stanford University’s H-STAR Institute, working on collaborative learning technology for children. Howie Fung is the Director of Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, which he joined in 2009. Prior to Wikimedia, he was a Product Manager at Rhapsody and at PayPal. The authors would like to acknowledge Alolita Sharma for her advice, which helped shape this article. © 2014 Kul Wadhwa and Howie Fung innovations / volume 9, number 3/4 127 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/9/3-4/127/705137/inov_a_00224.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Kul Wadhwa and Howie Fung structure and/or some people’s inability to comprehend the information that the Internet provides. However, other challenges can be tackled head on—such as cost of access, tools to improve contribution and content consumption, and educating users. These are typically perceived as “add-on” activities to be addressed later. They are not. When you build an Internet project, from the outset you must plan on “extending the core” of the overall platform as part of your foundational plan. CONTENT ECOSYSTEMS When creating an online product for users/customers in the developed world, you can focus on your product and not worry about all the other elements needed to make it useful—because they are either in place or being built by others. To be suc- cessful in the developing world, however, you have to think about not just building your project but an entire ecosystem. Since Wikipedia was launched in and remains heavily focused on the Western world, it has relied on existing platforms to scale: the Internet itself, widespread access, and people’s familiarity with paper encyclopedias. Thus, Wikipedia has been able to focus on the content side without worrying about the larger ecosys- tem. Content ecosystems are societal systems organized to create and distribute information. There are primarily two kinds of content ecosystems: expert-driven and community-driven. Expert-driven content ecosystems include existing, largely proprietary infor- mation sources and services. Examples are news and television companies, cable networks, educational institutions, and government. Community-driven online content ecosystems are relatively new and include Wikipedia, WikiHow, and various large-scale open-source software projects, such as Mozilla’s Firefox. These new content ecosystems are online, curated, and share information about topics of common interest. Expert-driven content ecosystems traditionally separate creators from con- sumers of information. These ecosystems focus on information developed by an accorded authority in a specific sector. This approach requires a centralized gov- erning body to generate and distribute the content. Expert-driven systems have and should continue to exist regardless of new technology. Community-driven content ecosystems are built around a new model of information sharing, where barriers between creators and consumers are reduced or eliminated. They can reach participants quickly and cost effectively because the model does not depend on external experts to create and tailor the content, which can be expensive and time consuming. These models can be localized more easily to the community’s language and culture, thus making content more relevant to local needs than what is produced by outside experts. However, since anyone can contribute and modify content, the downside to this approach can be ensuring quality control and providing curation oversight. Nevertheless, due to the content relevancy advantages of a community-driven 128 innovations / Digital Inclusion Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/9/3-4/127/705137/inov_a_00224.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Converting Western Internet to Indigenous Internet Experiments with the Mobile Internet Based on Wikipedia’s experience to date on scaling in the developing world, which is generally positive but not overall successful, it’s clear that more exper- iments are needed to fine tune Internet sites for mobile users in the developing world. To that end, Wikipedia launched a pilot program in Kenya in September 2013 with Airtel Africa to make Wikipedia available via text message. SMS is still the most popular data channel in the world, so content delivery must be tailored for that experience. However, it’s complicated to deliver Wikipedia content via SMS, with its limitation of 140 characters. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, for content to be relevant, it needs to be simple and short. Even if people are using smartphones, the form factor (smaller screen size compared to desktop/laptop computers), difficulty to input text (telephone keypad or compact keyboard), and the cost of staying online longer all add up to the need for a more efficient user engagement with content. The benefit of community-driven communities is that they can drive changes on their own. A group of volunteers within the Wikipedia community has started Wiki Project Med.12 One of their initiatives is to make medical con- tent more digestible for people in the developing world. They have teamed up with Translators without Borders to simplify medical content so it can be more useful to people and also easily translatable. That could make it easier for local communities to produce medical content in local languages. content model, this will be our focus. Aneel Karnani, from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, suggests that the only way to alleviate poverty is to focus on the poor as producers, rather than as a market of consumers.3 Therefore, it’s important that the next billion (and more) are not passive observers in the information economy. The Internet has, for the first time, allowed community-driven systems to develop and flourish. But because of the need for consumers to also be contribu- tors, an ecosystem must be developed to allow a community-driven model to suc- ceed. Experience building online communities, and working within collaborative models to produce high-quality output are prerequisites for tackling the complex task of building communities in local languages for the developing world. There is a lot of “machinery” involved to make a content-driven model work —tools, processes, structures, workflows, governance, etc. For example, each Wikipedia project has developed its own processes around how to decide which articles out of the hundreds that are created every day are encyclopedia-worthy, how to protect articles from vandalism, how to resolve disputes between editors, how to identify and correct copyright violations, how to improve quality and cov- erage within topic areas, to name a few. Each project developed these systems innovations / volume 9, number 3/4 129 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/9/3-4/127/705137/inov_a_00224.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Kul Wadhwa and Howie Fung organically, so the rules around what is encyclopedia-worthy may be different on the German Wikipedia than they are on the English Wikipedia. Thus, each Wikipedia community has been able to develop a system of policies and processes resulting in the creation of their own online encyclopedias, whose quality rivals professionally produced encyclopedias (e.g., Britannica and Science) with cover- age several orders of magnitude greater. WIKIPEDIA’S TENTACLES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD Wikipedia strives to be all inclusive: it’s the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. For this to truly be the case, everyone must be able to contribute to it and have access to it. However, that is not the case today. Wikipedia currently holds almost 33 million articles (as of August 2014) in over 285 languages. But the vast majority of the content is in languages from the developed world. English alone accounts for almost 14 percent of the content (over 4.5 million articles) and the top five languages (English, Swedish, Dutch, German, and French) account for more than a third. Moreover, the top 10 lan- guages account for more than 50 percent of the content on Wikipedia.