Three-year plan

See also One-year plan and Five-year plan

This plan is not official, but is a brainstorming area for any user to suggest to the board what their focus should be over the next three years.

One priority activity for the Wikimedia Foundation is the development of a three-year plan. Please add your thoughts on what the Foundation should be aiming for over the coming three years.

I. Redesign our hardware and backup architecture

Target: Support a thousand million hits a day with redundant backups and 99.9% uptime.
Target cost: Maintenance/depreciation costs under $50k/yr; support staff: down to one FTE.

Some discussions on the matter

II. Expand the breadth of our contributors

Initial target: Attract talented music, art, literature, economics, and other contributors on a par with our scientists, mathematicians, technologists, and Pokémon fans.
Secondary target: Attract recognized experts in 6 or 7 new fields who contribute actively and are willing to publicly support Wikipedia (cf. string theory).
Channels: contact with subject-specific mailing lists and newsgroups, university departments, other research groups.

There seem to be already many courses at university level that have editing in wikipedia as a requirement for credits. I think this could be somehow reinforced by giving them a special platform. Ben1979 06:36, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

III. Expand our offline audience

Target: 100,000 physical instances of WM products distributed : Wikipedia on CD/DVD Wikimedia and Mandrakesoft, de:Wikipedia:Wikipedia-CD, de:Wikipedia:Wikipedia-Distribution
Products: 1 successful series of WikiReaders in 5+ languages, 1 set of beautiful, informationally-dense posters, 1 iconic t-shirt.
Channels: Develop contacts in publishing, manufacturing & distribution, distill collective knowledge of production techniques & materials.

IV. Scale peer review

Target: Weekly snapshots of coverage, activity, and quality of content by subject area article validation
Method: Greatly expanded meta-information on articles, including classification, estimated time invested, reverse watchlist stats, peer review milestones. Expanded meta-information on editors, including peer review activity, peer-verified qualification.
Secondary Target: Improved tools for reviewing multiple edits at once; combined with extra meta-information about editors for smooth handling of malicious contributors.

V. Unify disparate languages and WM projects

Target: A unified login to all WM projects. All projects converted to UTF-8. A translation interface (and "translate" tab) within each project. (cf. recent discussion b/t Cimon & 'offray')
Metrics: Weekly snapshots within each project of translation coverage and activity. 1000+ articles translated *into* each of the five largest Wikipedia languages each month.
Channels: Contact with popular translation software for interface design, expansion of current divided translation projects.

These are my current thoughts; please comment and add your own. Sj 02:09, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wikidebate

Just a thought that it would be possible to make a wikidebate or wikiopinion community so that people posting opinions and debate in wikipedia have a place to discuss hot topics. This could also include a functional wikiblog connection. Bloggers could post and link to other blogger's posts. Most primary opinions would be locked and be similar to a NYTimes article but the water cooler discussions could take place in a wikidebate forum with POV defended on each side. This certainly seems like something that could be done on a 3 year scale. --Dave moeller 22:09, 27 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Other ideas

Buy X new servers
Publish our first X WikiReaders in English.
Reach at least 1,000 articles in 100 languages for Wikipedias
Redefine WikiSource.
Establish 25 Wiktionaries.
Attend X major summits/conferences (see below)

Conferences

WSIS in Tunis

The World Summit for the Information Society is a big meeting organized by the International Telecommunication Union. I think that if Wikimedia can be present, it would be a must.

It takes place in 2 phases. The first phase took place in Geneva on 10 to 12 December 2003. The second phase will be in Tunis, from 16 to 18 November 2005.

It means finding sponsor(s) to cover the costs, as this obviously can't be from donation.

For further information, see WSIS.

TiC21

A Sustainable development conference in France. $800 for a booth on the floor and tickets to the multi-day? event. Lots of UN people and agricultural groups involved.

Scalability

Thinking in years scalability is the most important issue. Advertising is done by the community but the infrastructure will remain a bottleneck. The database will soon reach scales of Terabytes and we will not only have billion hits a day but billion articles! Wikipedia is growing exponential and there is a potential for more exponential growth in the next years that cannot be handled by some more servers. Thinking big we need a scalable system where each Wikipedia can be spread on as many servers as necessary and where mirror servers can be set up easily. We are yet building another kind of World Wide Web with bidirectional links, page version history and page name registry whether we like it or not. Yes, it's a tricky task. Maybe research and standarisation institutions like W3C can help, maybe it's better not to purely try it with volunteers. But not accepting that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia project are forming a rapidly growing network that will not fit into a single server located at a single institution means accepting that we will have to say "no more articles, please" some day. -- Nichtich 11:38, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Quality control

One thing I would like to be put in the plan is a form of article quality control. One of the problems the outside world has with Wikipedia, is that there is no guarantee that the article has been written by someone who is an expert in the field. I would like to see some way of reviewing an article so that we can say "this-and-that-and-that article has been looked at by a person/several people who should know and been considered good/sufficient/defective in such-and-such way". - Andre Engels 09:43, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hrm... we could make it so that registered users can vote on the quality of an article, from 1-5 or some other scale. Except, they can reverse their vote later on - that is, if the article gets better than they can assign it a greater rank. An article with a rank greater than 4, with more votes than half of the other page (more than 50% voting popularity) could be considered reviewed.

Oddly enough, you could also use it as a way to organize articles for a 1.0 release as well.

We could have a list of the best articles of wikipedia! The voting on articles could be similar to imdb.com where you select your vote from a menu and then have a special page where you can compare all the votes you submitted. You should be able to recast it as often as you want to. I suggest also the main page features some records like "most read article of the day" and "most updated article of the day" (this last thing is in wikibooks) "most updated newcomer." Ben1979 06:31, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Stable versions -- Zondor 02:09, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]