Advancing Global South Access to Open Knowledge

Internet use is growing rapidly around the world, especially through increased mobile penetration. In developing countries, mobile internet use is projected to grow from 28 percent in 2014 to 45 percent by 2020—a total of 2.25 billion potential new users for any internet platform. This is a huge opportunity for organizations working in media, technology, and education. It’s also an exciting indicator of social change potential, as broad access to information is vital to development. To serve the “next billion” internet users, organizations need empirically grounded strategies and products that are uniquely tailored to these new users and their contexts.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has a revolutionary mission: To share the sum of all knowledge with every single human being. It is thus eager to engage new users in emerging internet markets. Yet in many countries, Wikipedia awareness and use is relatively low compared to overall internet use. To better serve new audiences, Wikimedia began the New Readers project, which prioritized using design research to deeply understand how best to engage and grow potential readers in the Global South. Building on internal research conducted in Mexico and South Africa, Wikimedia engaged Reboot to collaboratively extend research in and identify opportunities for India and Nigeria. This work would not only help grow readership, but it would strengthen Wikipedia itself; engaging a wider diversity of users and editors into its movement could help address the movement’s self-identified challenges of systemic bias and cultural imbalance in its coverage.

Reboot collaborated closely with multiple Wikimedia Foundation teams, including Reading, Global Reach, Communications, Design Research, and Community Engagement. Building on a careful analysis of the Foundation’s priorities and constraints, and in close partnership with staff, we conducted research and identified opportunities for engaging new users in India and Nigeria.

Select services for this project included:

• Design Research

  We conducted design research in both India and Nigeria with nearly 150 respondents, using methods including ethnographic interviews, user observation, and technology demos. The research findings provided a nuanced understanding of how users seek and learn information, use the internet, and perceive of and use Wikipedia. Based on the research, we developed user personas to help Wikimedia better understand different user’s information needs, internet habits, and technology ecosystems.

• Strategic Advisory

  Building on the research findings, Reboot helped design and facilitate internal discussions at the Foundation to explore opportunity areas for growing its global readership. Results included product, distribution, partnership, and communications strategies to better engage new readers in target markets, as well as ideas for better leveraging Wikimedia’s passionate global community in doing so. Through collaborative exercises, we helped the Foundation segment and prioritize different user groups and unmet needs, and evaluate which strategies to pursue moving forward.

The research findings offer a fascinating glimpse into the future of internet use as online demographics continue to shift. They include insights about the constraints of accessing information in areas of poor connectivity and expensive data. For many users in the Global South, for example, data is a precious commodity that must be carefully rationed. This has implications for the development of knowledge products, impacting app size, data compression, and offline access options.

The Wikimedia Foundation, in line with its longstanding commitment to open knowledge, is sharing research findings and forward progress on its New Readers MetaWiki page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers

Moving forward, Wikimedia is pursuing several of the product, communications, and partnership opportunities surfaced. Beyond audience development, our collaboration also helped strengthen the Foundation’s design research capabilities, and Wikimedia is now deepening the use of such methods across its work.