Mobile Projects/strategy

Product strategy

The strategic objectives of the Foundation apply to mobile in the following priority:

• Increase in mobile page views to 2 billion/mo by end of 2012, 1 billion readers by 2015
• Strong growth in Global South readers and female contributors
• Editor retention and new editor engagement

The aggressive growth in page views will consist of organic growth and audience expansion. Marketing efforts for audience expansion can be enhanced greatly by mobile carriers. Therefore, it makes sense to partner with mobile carriers in the Global South, where readership can be greatly expanded in large mobile populations. We achieve two strategic goals at once by increasing readership in the Global South.

To achieve these objectives, the following rough global breakdown is helpful:

Region	Phone type	% of installed base	Degree of change	Wikipedia use
Global South	No-data feature phone Feature phone Smartphone	~15% ~75% ~10%	quickly shrinking stable or moderately growing growing moderately	Reading Reading Reading and contribution
Global North	Smartphone Feature phone No-data feature phone	~30-50% ~40-60% ~5-10%	rapidly growing moderately or quickly shrinking quickly shrinking	Reading and contribution Reading Reading

Assumptions

Needless to say, these numbers are approximate and gross generalizations. The variations among individual countries can be large. For example, India is dominated by Nokia and Samsung feature phones, but smartphone growth is rapid, albeit among a small minority of the population (primarily young males). Whereas most of Africa is still dominated by feature phones and no-data feature phones. Both regions represent enormous populations in the Global South (roughly 1 billion and 700 million, respectively).

An important assumption when evaluating mobile populations is the difference between installed base and new phones. Most publicly available handset figures refer to new phone sales, because it is easier to track new shipments. So in many parts of the world, smartphone shipments can be 30% or more of all new phone sales. However, the percentage of new phones versus phones in use may vary considerably between countries. Put another way, the rate at which phones are replaced can vary tremendously.

As an example of the potential variation among countries, the Japanese mobile market has undergone large and rapid changes in recent years. Some regulatory measures like Mobile Number Portability and reduced handset subsidies by carriers have caused handset turnover to increase from a typical timeframe of six months, to two years! At the same time, iPhone popularity took several years to take hold and for many people the iPhone is a second phone. In addition, Android has been adopted en masse by Docomo and au (the largest and second-largest carriers) and currently most new phones are Android based. So over time, Android will become a dominant part of the installed base, but even after several years the percentage of phones in use that are Android may be less than a majority.

Conclusions

In consideration of the above, several conclusions can be reached:

• Mobile readership in the Global South is overall of highest strategic importance

• The goal of product strategy in the Global South is to enhance readership, simply because editing on feature phones is highly restricted

• While smartphone readership is important in developed countries, strategically the editor-related strategic objectives are a priority

This results in two parallel development paths:

1) carrier-focused readership expansion in the Global South, and

2) smartphone-based editing- or engagement-related features

A final factor to consider is that there are many third-party apps for smartphones that do a good job of improving the reading experience of Wikipedia. This removes some of the urgency of implementing these features. Let's focus more on editor retention and new editor engagement, which are higher priority anyway.

Finally, there are five ways to provide Wikipedia to carriers, all of which can be zero-rated (no charge for data access):

• Wikipedia Zero in browser
• RSS feeds of Article of the Day or In the News
• Android app
• J2ME app for reading WIkipedia (could also be zero-rated)
• USSD/SMS for search and basic reading

The first three will be developed internally and the last two will be developed with partners. More information about carrier services can be found here.

Usage and feature framework

New feature ideas can fall into several categories, which are loosely defined as:

• Audience building, or enhancing and enriching the experience of our readers

• Peripheral community building, or the first step toward engaging readers in early steps of participation

• New editor conversion, or the pathways, techniques and tools that convert readers or people in the peripheral community into editors (this category includes two stages: First Editor and New Editor)

• Active editing, or the myriad ways in which experienced editors develop articles, curate content, create or modify templates and projects, and define categories and policies

In terms of mobile use, there is a definite skew toward the first three categories above, with great potential for specialized tools to support the last category. The current development activities in the Foundation are very much focused on the third and fourth categories, and most likely mobile development will follow the initiatives in those areas. For example, certain ways of curating new pages or content could be extremely handy on mobile devices, but those techniques would follow from the development in those areas pertaining to the main site.

However, when it comes to the second category, there have only been exploratory motions on the main site in order to understand the dynamics of the readership audience and what forms of engagement could make sense. Mobile use is particularly suitable for this category, as there are significant mobile behaviors which can be leveraged to create a so-called funnel of readers becoming more involved, some of whom eventually become editors.

The suggestions below fall mostly into the second and third categories, and there is extensive work being done in the third and fourth categories that can be found elsewhere in the Wikimedia universe. For example, an excellent analysis of the activities involved in active editing can be found here:

User:Raindrift/Workflows

Another framework

The Reader-to-Leader Framework at AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction

This is a scholarly study of a variety of social networking and collaboration systems, including Wikipedia. The general framework proposed defines the following stages of users:

• Reader
• Contributor
• Collaborator
• Leader

Can this be useful?

Editor to user ratios have been going down precipitously even when the number of editors are reasonable constant. To the degree that the Foundation's mission is to empower content development first and to disseminate it second, this is a major problem. In this sense, any engagement with editing and contribution from mobile would provide an important step forward for the foundation toward fulfilling its mission, even if these users did not always (or even often) become much more involved in contributing to the site.