Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-03-29/Op-Ed

Maryana Pinchuk is the Wikimedia Foundation's Principal Product Manager, and has been a Wikipedian since 2011.

In March 2023, I helped organize a Zoom call to discuss external trends that may impact the Wikimedia movement, and over a hundred Wikimedians attended to talk about the opportunities and risks of generative AI. But a different concern also surfaced that really surprised and stuck with me. Longtime English Wikipedia editor Ragesoss noted that when observing how his children like to learn things online, he saw that instead of going to websites, they sought out personalities who had built large followings on platforms like YouTube, and could provide information from an authentically human point of view. In the year since that AI call, the English Wikipedia community has heatedly debated how to respond to the opportunities and threats of generative AI. But this other trend – of people (especially younger people) seeking out personalities to aggregate knowledge for them, on social platforms that make it easy and rewarding for contributors to participate in new formats like short video – hasn’t been discussed as much. And while some Wikipedians may wonder what any of this has to do with encyclopedic content, I believe that this trend deserves as much attention and conversation in our community.

Despite the excitement (and hype) around generative AI in the press over the last year, Wikipedia is still used by more people globally than ChatGPT.^[1] But, when looking at Wikipedia usage compared to usage of popular social platforms frequented by young people, the comparison is far less favorable for us. TikTok has close to two billion monthly global users – twice as many as Wikipedia – and is still growing.^[2] And while it's tempting to dismiss TikTok and apps like it as entertainment platforms where young people only share and watch lip-syncing and viral dances, consider that a third of US people under age 30 recently reported regularly getting their news from TikTok, and one in four US TikTok users say they come to the platform for educational purposes like learning history.

Meanwhile, recent surveys by the Wikimedia Foundation Brand Health team have shown that worldwide, people aged 18–24 report being less aware of, less likely to use, and less likely to recommend Wikipedia to a friend than older age groups. Many of these younger audiences report preferring to get information via video platforms like YouTube or social knowledge sites like Quora. Traditionally, young people have always been a huge staple of Wikipedia readership. What could account for fewer young people than retirees today saying that they use or are even aware of Wikipedia's existence, and more going to social apps for educational content?

I think it's important to look outward at what's happened in the world in the last decade to better understand these data:

• There has been a proliferation of places where people can share and seek information online. Older platforms (e.g., Twitter/X, Facebook, Reddit) have been joined by newer competitors (e.g., TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Discord) – competing not just for people's time and attention, but also for contributors who can make the most engaging, viral user-generated content. People with knowledge to share now have many choices for where and how to share their knowledge (whether that's text, long or short video, or audio). Successful creators can reach huge audiences quickly and can expect significant monetary rewards, so they are incentivized to produce highly engaging content on a variety of topics, including educational or edu-tainment content.
• How people interact with knowledge online has also changed. Millennials (my generation) were in their teens or early 20s when the first smartphones debuted, so most of us still had to use a laptop or desktop computer with a keyboard and web browser to explore and participate online. To learn or share information, we had to read or write it. In contrast, 18–24-year olds today were small children when the smartphone revolution hit, so their first online experiences likely happened on a touch screen, via mobile apps that require no interaction with web browsers or Google, and little or no typing. They also haven't known a world without user-generated video, and their first experience learning or sharing knowledge online was likely not a website but a YouTube video.
• Lastly, expectations for what "knowledge" must look like, online or offline, have changed. Millennials are the last generation to grow up routinely seeing physical encyclopedias in the home or school. I have been told by instructors in Wiki Education, who work with classrooms of US college students, that today's students have to first be told what an encyclopedia is, before being introduced to the concept of Wikipedia. These are college students in one of the wealthiest, most knowledge-privileged countries on the planet, but they've grown up in a world where traditional learning methods and resources are, like everything else, also rapidly changing in response to technology.

Given all these changes to how people expect to get information online, what opportunities does Wikipedia have to continue to meet the needs of this younger generation and generations to come?

I think there are a few strategies we could pursue.

One strategy, which I’ve heard expressed by some Wikipedians, is evolving what our content or projects looks like, to better fit some of these new expectations and preferences. There are different proposals for how to achieve this that have recently been proposed and discussed on the Wikimedia-l mailing list: for example, should we provide the ability to create and include more interactive elements (like graphs, timelines, or quizzes) on Wikipedia articles? Should we produce and include video explainers of important topics on Wikipedia? Though the specifics differ, fundamentally these ideas are about making Wikipedia more of a “knowledge destination” that younger audiences will want to visit – to read and to contribute to – instead of going to places like TikTok or YouTube. But when this conversation came up at WikiConference North America last fall, I heard many Wikipedians express concern about where pursuing this strategy could lead us. There was fear of making Wikipedia into something it isn’t. There was also fear about the cost and risks of building big new software features and trying to compete with massive for-profit technology companies for users. I think all of these concerns are very valid.

Some alternative strategies might instead focus on:

1. Making sure people continue to get reliable information from Wikipedia, and that they understand what Wikipedia is and that they can join our movement, no matter where they like to share or receive information online. This “free knowledge everywhere” strategy seems promising to me because creators on YouTube and TikTok already routinely harvest facts, ideas, and images from Wikipedia and include them in their videos (and it's possible that in this way, information from Wikipedia is already being viewed by more young people outside of Wikipedia than on it, in the formats that they prefer). However, Wikipedia is rarely credited or acknowledged in these videos, so audiences have no way of knowing about the amazing volunteer project that brings them this information for free, let alone that they can join in and contribute. One way to change this might be to make using our new sound logo a more consistent practice whenever Wikipedia knowledge is shared externally.
2. Evolving the habit that has been so standard among people of my generation when reading or hearing some claim that sounds dubious: opening up a new tab and checking what Wikipedia has to say. This strategy is about seeing if we can continue to make Wikipedia the "Internet's conscience" – i.e., the knowledge commons that provides additional context; organizes secondary sources; and gives ordinary people the ability to see, participate in, and influence the consensus on what is known – while adapting to the fact that "opening up a new tab and reading longform text" might not be the way younger audiences use the Internet anymore. One way to do this might be to provide instant verification with Wikipedia wherever people are getting information.

My team at the Wikimedia Foundation, Future Audiences, is exploring these different strategies, and our mandate is to evaluate them with quick experiments (including an experiment to build and test that last example, just-in-time third-party information verification with Wikipedia). But we are not the only ones within the Wikimedia movement who are interested in better understanding and showing up in this space: Basque Wikipedians have been turning Wikipedia articles into short videos for YouTube and TikTok as well as adding them back to Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia UK chapter has recently started their own TikTok channel.

I would love to hear from more Wikipedians: what role could Wikipedia play in this new personality-driven knowledge era? What new strategies seem most promising (or not) to you? What aren't we as a movement talking about or doing that we should be?