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Wikipedia’s digital transformation

plan

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Abbad Diraneyya

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Former Knowledge Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation

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“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

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  • Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Niccolò Caranti Creative Commons 4.0

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“New digital initiatives are great, but if you haven’t yet closed some branches or changed the nature of the service model, you haven’t gotten anything done.”

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  • Mckinsey.

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  • LLMs: Interactive knowledge > traditional encyclopedias
  • Quora: Q&A format competing with manual reading
  • Khanmigo: Personalized education experience
  • Google’s Knowledge graph: Limiting click-through rates

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Competition analysis

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Status quo of Wikipedia: 2024

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Wikipedia’s Digital transformation: 2034

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  • LLM corpus: Wikipedia's vast text + 100M photo, audio, & video files
  • KPIs: Outputs of 200 Wiki orgs
  • Finance: Revenue & resourcing

data

technologies

  • Generative AI: Interactive & user-tailored content
  • Predictive AI: Strategy, KPIs, revenue (donations), & resourcing

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  • Independent volunteers
  • Loosely linked / siloed organizations
  • Year-on-year cumbersome & lengthy planning
  • Manual processes
  • Ad-hoc goals & tasks

Current Workforce

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  • Individuals & organizations connected through one digital strategy
  • Smart data-driven goals
  • Prioritized tasks & shared workflows for everyone
  • Automated pipelines

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Workforce changes

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  • Change resistance
    • “The Wiki way is the best”
  • Overconfidence
    • Little interest in innovative formats due to content
  • Lack of trust in GenAI
    • Irony: analogous to the lack of trust in Wikipedia

Organizational culture

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