Presentation

Hello - we are Amanda, Bruno, Franny, Hector and Yosuke of the Cyberlaw: Difficult Problems course. Feedback from people who use and are familiar with Wikipedia/Wikimedia is an extremely important part of formulating our proposed solution, and we thank you for your interest and contributions. We only ask that you direct your comments and input to the other Future of Wikipedia pages, and allow us to use this Presentation page to create our final class presentation. We look forward to hearing from you!

Introduction

[Hector to expand]

• Overview of other problems considered, including:

- governance

- community

- attribution

- technical infrastructure

- vandalism

- dispute resolution

• Participation and interest phenomenon (harnessing the time and energy people are willing to devote to Wikipedia)

Selected Key Problems to Address

[Yosuke to expand]

1. Quality of content (e.g. factual errors on Wikipedia lowers the reliability and credibility of its content)

2. Wikipedia's editor base is decreasing (existing editors are losing interest and it is difficult to recruit new editors)

2.1 Deals with issues of:

- community

- motivations

- outreach and public relations

Different Perspectives on the Key Problems

[Bruno and Franny to expand]

• Bridgespan
• Wikimedia
• Wikipedia Review
• General public (Mechanical Turk responses)

[INSERT EXCEL RESULTS]

Analysis

[Bruno and Franny to expand]

• Must reach out to user base outside of Wikipedia's community
• What demographic are we reaching out to? how will we reach that demographic?
• Utilizing crowdsourcing techniques to highlight factual inaccuracies
• Organization and filtering techniques will make it easier to match factual inaccuracies with editors (new or existing) willing and able to make corrections

Proposed Solution

[Amanda to expand] Create an application plug in for the purposes of:

- highlighting incorrect information and creating an accessible database issues;

- reaching out to readers of Wikipedia and drawing them into the Wikipedia editor community.

We envision an application plug-in that sits as an icon on the user's browser toolbar. When the user comes across an article they believe to be incorrect, they can open the icon into a simple horizontal toolbar across the bottom of the page....[INSERT SPECS AND WRITTEN DESCRIPTION]

Implementation

1. Name application

2. Reach out to Mozilla community to build proposed FireFox application extension.

3. Work with Wikimedia/Bridgespan to incorporate landing page and application with Wikipedia.

Future Steps

• Discuss promotional campaign to launch application and increase Wikipedia's user base (e.g. Donate edits to Wikipedia)
• Filtering/sorting mechanisms for the landing page - perhaps link to a re-organized Community Portal page
• Link landing page to a web initiative similar to Aardvark
• Integration with banner and other promotional tools on Wikipedia pages
• Strengthening relationship and partnering with secondary school systems (e.g. lesson plan proposal)