Research:Knowledge Gaps Index/Taxonomy

In response to Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 strategic direction, the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation is developing a framework to understand and measure knowledge gaps. Our goal is to capture the multidimensional aspect of knowledge gaps and inform long-term decision-making.

Our first milestone is to develop a taxonomy of knowledge gaps. The taxonomy offers a grouping and the descriptions of the different Wikimedia knowledge gaps. The first draft of the taxonomy was now published in September 2020, and after incorporating community feedback, we published a second version in February 2021.

Learn more!

The Knowledge Gaps Taxonomy

You can use the following material to learn about this research:

• A summary of the taxonomy of knowledge gaps (PDF on Commons). We encourage you to start by reading this shorter version.
• A presentation (slides; video on Commons, video on YouTube). Sometimes it is easier to listen to a presentation than to read a long document. Sometimes you may want to do both.
• The complete write-up of the draft of the taxonomy of knowledge gaps (full paper). We encourage you to read it if you want to learn more about the methods and sources used in this research.

Feedback period

We would like to thank everyone for their feedback on the first version of the taxonomy during the month of September 2020.

The collection of comments and suggestion received can be found here.

We thank you for your engagement. Wikimedia Foundation's Research Team.

Incorporating Community Feedback

October-November 2020. The team analyzes the feedback received and incorporates it as much as possible.

December 2020. The team publishes a report with high level information about the feedback received, incorporated, and rejected, supported by our reasoning.

January 2021. Please note that we could not deliver on publishing the report on December 2020 due to the more extensive time required than planned based on some of the feedback we received. We expect to release the updated taxonomy and summary of changes by 1 February 2021. Note: We may not be able to respond to every feedback at the individual level. We promise that we will read your feedback and take it into account as we improve the taxonomy.

January 29th, 2021. The summary of changes is online! We summarized the actions we took to incorporate the community's feedback into the second version of the Taxonomy. Please find it here.

February 1st, 2021. The second version of the taxonomy is now publicly available via arXiv here.