Today, we had a discussion on strategy for wikimedia movement for 2030, with few Tamil wikipedians, media, government, academic friends.
Wikimedia Foundation is planning on what are the things we should focus on wiki ecosystem, to make it even better for the people in 2030.
I added the following thoughts.
1. Space for adding tiny data.
In future, there will be a drastic change on computers and input devices. There will be voice inputs. Computers will be embedded in all devices. They will be communicating to each other. They will be enabled with augemented reality, virtual reality, artificial intellience to get and express various data. There should be a common data source to get any data from. Wikimedia movement should be that common data source, for all devices.
There should be options to give input as tiny bits. Knowledge should be shared by anyone, in any form. It should not be only in text form or as article. sound input and tiny bits of inputs should be allowed in wiki. Those content should be automatically translated into many languages.
For example, I should ask a device like “Hey, what is the movie shown in nearby theatres to me? ” The device should get that data from wiki. I should ask “What is the price of a TV in chennai and in Austria? ” It should get the details from wiki and reply me in voice in my language. Wiki should allow these kind of data.
2. Decentralised Wikis
Git like decentralised wiki editing will enable, more content coming from the poor internet countries.
The following are the inputs from other friends.
1. Archiving old books like google’s one million books project
2. Archiving old photos, pamphlets, advertisements, magazines
3. Connect with many organizations, governments to get their archives released in CC license
4. Connect with mobile/camera manufactures to add CC license details within the device
5. Connect with social media sites like Facebook to add options to release media files in CC license
6. Finding false news within the flood of information will be a huge problem in the coming days. Is it possible for wikipedia to verify and authenticate the news that are being shared on social media?
7. wiki should be help to build education materials for school/college students, so that all the world get free resources for studies.
8. Data should be added in a unique way, so that it is transformed to multi formats, multi languages automatically.
Hope these will be discussed by the foundation team and taken forward further.
After the meeting, met photographers dillibabu and sudharsan. They agreed to give their 1000s of high quality photographs taken around India. I will upload them to commons. Will share the details once started.
Thanks for Wikimedia Foundation for starting these kind of discussions. We need to plan for the future and make it happens. Visit the website and http://2030.wikimedia.org/ and share your thoughts on building a better future for wikimedia projects.
Learning on how to set plans for FreeTamilEbooks.com and kaniyam.com projects. Let us dream a lot and make them true.
Few more photos are here – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tshrinivasan/albums/72157684407240936
Going GNU 