What is the problem?

Part of the (Structured Data Across Wikimedia) SDAW grant aims for WMF to develop systems for structured data on Wikipedia as a follow-up to similar development that was completed on Commons as part of the previous SDC grant. Specifically, the grant requires us to build infrastructure and tools to allow structured metadata to be added to other content across Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia itself.

Tagging articles, paragraphs, and even sentences with the relevant language-independent structured Wikidata concepts - topics - will help translation, discovery, and localization. It will also help us match content in one place (like Commons or another language Wikipedia) to another. This would help with things like illustrating articles and growing contributions. We will start with section topics.

Structuring content into discrete sections beyond the wikitext would also make it much easier to program machines to answer discrete questions and provide quick facts. This would support external platforms trying to generate concise answers, and facilitate translation and knowledge parity.

Two additional goals stated in the grant are to increase the number of readers, especially from underserved communities; and to increase the number of contributors and editors, especially from emerging markets and on mobile. Therefore, it’s also critical that we ensure that the systems we use can work with languages in our underserved communities and that they don’t introduce additional bias and limitations to our projects.

How can we help you?

We will need support creating and monitoring the project page and launching discussions with the community. We are specifically interested in how much community members on different wikis want to be part of the human-in-the-loop process for maintaining topical metadata. We'd like to see an engagement plan.

What does success look like?

We've launched a project page and have had constructive discussions with the community around human-in-the-loop processes for structured topical metadata on Wikipedia sections.

I'd like to think of this task as a sort of epic and collaborate with CSR to create smaller tasks as necessary (to create the project page; reach out to certain community members; etc.).

What is your deadline?

End of Feb 2021 for the project page and launching the discussion; end of June 2021 for the first round of feedback to be completed (with iterations and responses along the way). We expect the project to continue for the following two years (the grant ends in June 2023).