Hey all,

(apologies for cross-posting)

We’re sharing a proposed program for the Wikimedia Foundation’s upcoming fiscal 
year (2018-19) and would love to hear from you. This plan builds extensively on 
projects and initiatives driven by volunteer contributors and organizations in 
the Wikimedia movement, so your input is critical.

Why a “knowledge integrity” program?

Increased global attention is directed at the problem of misinformation and how 
media consumers are struggling to distinguish fact from fiction. Meanwhile, 
thanks to the sources they cite, Wikimedia projects are uniquely positioned as 
a reliable gateway to accessing quality information in the broader knowledge 
ecosystem. How can we mobilize these citations as a resource and turn them into 
a broader, linked infrastructure of trust to serve the entire internet?  Free 
knowledge grounds itself in verifiability and transparent attribution policies. 
Let’s look at 4 data points as motivating stories:
Wikipedia sends tens of millions of people to external sources each year. We 
want to conduct research to understand why and how readers leave our site.
The Internet Archive has fixed over 4 million dead links on Wikipedia. We want 
to enable instantaneous archiving of every link on all Wikipedias to ensure the 
long-term preservation of the sources Wikipedians cite.
#1Lib1Ref reaches 6 million people on social media. We want to bring #1Lib1Ref 
to Wikidata and more languages, spreading the message that references improve 
quality.
33% of Wikidata items represent sources (journals, books, works). We want to 
strengthen community efforts to build a high-quality, collaborative database of 
all cited and citable sources.
A 5-year vision

Our 5-year vision for the Knowledge Integrity program is to establish Wikimedia 
as the hub of a federated, trusted knowledge ecosystem. We plan to get there by 
creating:
A roadmap to a mature, technically and socially scalable, central repository of 
sources.
Developed network of partners and technical collaborators to contribute to and 
reuse data about citations.
Increased public awareness of Wikimedia’s vital role in information literacy 
and fact-checking.

5 directions for 2018-2019

We have identified 5 levers of Knowledge Integrity: research, infrastructure 
and tooling, access and preservation, outreach, and awareness. Here’s what we 
want to do with each:

Continue to conduct research to understand how readers access sources and how 
to help contributors improve citation quality.
Improve tools for linking information to external sources, catalogs, and 
repositories.
Ensure resources cited across Wikimedia projects are accessible in perpetuity.
Grow outreach and partnerships to scale community and technical efforts to 
improve the structure and quality of citations.
Increase public awareness of the processes Wikimedians follow to verify 
information and articulate a collective vision for a trustable web.

Who is involved?

The core teams involved in this proposal are:
Wikimedia Foundation Technology’s Research Team
Wikimedia Foundation Community Engagement’s Programs team (Wikipedia Library)
Wikimedia Deutschland Engineering’s Wikidata team

The initiative also spans across an ecosystem of possible partners including 
the Internet Archive, ContentMine, Crossref, OCLC, OpenCitations, and Zotero. 
It is further made possible by funders including the Sloan, Gordon and Betty 
Moore, and Simons Foundations who have been supporting the WikiCite initiative 
to date.

How you can participate

You can read the fine details of our proposed year-1 plan, and provide your 
feedback, on mediawiki.org: 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technology/Annual_Plans/FY2019/CDP3:_Knowledge_Integrity

We’ve also created a brief introductory slidedeck about our motivation and 
goals: 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Knowledge_Integrity_CDP_proposal_%E2%80%93_FY2018-19.pdf

WikiCite has laid the groundwork for many of these efforts. Read last year’s 
report: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiCite_2017_report.pdf

Recent initiatives like the just released citation dataset foreshadow the work 
we want to do: 
https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/what-are-the-ten-most-cited-sources-on-wikipedia-lets-ask-the-data-34071478785a

Lastly, this April we’re celebrating Open Citations Month; it’s right in the 
spirit of Knowledge Integrity: 
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/04/02/initiative-for-open-citations-birthday/


-- 
Dario Taraborelli  Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter 
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