Wikimedia Product/Inclusive Product Development/Resources/Historical Exclusion

The goal of this document is to articulate the WMF product department's current understanding of historical exclusion and how it manifests itself for the readers and contributors of the WMF platforms. This document is not exhaustive, but attempts to document what we know as well as what we do NOT know along with the changing research that informs our thinking.

When we speak of historical exclusion in the context of the Wikimedia Foundation, we speak of it in the terms of the mission that WMF product staff support. The key terminology in our mission names our audience as people around the world and our goal to empower and engage those people to collect and develop educational content.

Barriers to contributing

World illiteracy halved between 1979 and 2020

While this section focuses on the barriers to contributing, it is important to note that some of these very issues also impact people who consume the knowledge of our platforms.

When the audiences of our platforms are meant to be as all-encompassing as "people around the world" we are aware that by scope, the nature of our platforms being digital education content limits the audiences to people with:

Literacy
Internet access - For example, see Fastest growing online populations based on relative year-on-year user growth as of January 2020
Hardware access
Time - this is of special importance when it comes to contributing to the wikis.

There are other barriers that inhibit contributing that are not limited to the above. Some examples include the usability of the platforms, the welcoming nature of the movement, and more. However, the above list simply includes the barriers that we believe are out of scope for the product department to address. Note: The product department is not the same as saying these are out of scope of the WMF at large.

In addition, we know that by design, the WMF projects over-index on documenting knowledge that can be represented in text and images. By design, we represent knowledge that can be traced to an original source which can result in a skewed representation that favors knowledge on the side of access and power.

Internal terminology

Other internal terms which we have used to refer to users who have been historically excluded include:

Emerging markets
Underrepresented
Marginalized

We opt for the term "historical exclusion" because it emphasizes the consequence of power while fostering a spirit of accountability for the systems upholding the exclusion. This term also does not erase the agency of the demographics impacted by the exclusion, which has been an effect terms such as marginalized. Language is ever-evolving and we are hoping to evolve with it as learn more.

No official definition by intention

In the context of this document, a growth market is defined as the population a team identifies as key to intentionally build with and include during product development. The intention of including these users is to repair the ongoing harm of historical exclusion.

The product department has decided not to prescribe a list of exhaustive historically excluded audiences for product teams to focus on due to subjectivity that can arise when each team tackles their respective charters.

For example, the growth market for participants for the WMF Wishlist will be different than the audience that Growth team considers when they are encouraging readers to make their first edit. Likewise, users of the IOS platforms are very different from potential users of the Android platforms- the markets, or audiences, are shaped externally by the manufacturers of those products. The growth markets for "historically excluded" users in those contexts will therefore be different in nature.

Framework for identifying growth market

Here we present a set of abstract questions a Product Team may ask themselves when embarking on a new product and attempting to define a growth market:

Who are the pre-existing populations for the platform at hand? Some sub-questions that can get you to a tangible understanding may include:
- What are the market sizes for platform format? Markets vary by both device and operating system in digital spaces. Desktop versus mobile, ios versus Android.
- How do those markets vary by axes such as geography, language, and gender?
- What are the population sizes for speakers of a language?
Identify the biggest delta in existing potential population and the current existing user population on the platforms. Note that our data is limited to geography and language spoken. Supplement via surveys where it makes sense.
Mitigate the gaps in "market data" by creating qualitative personas that factor in identities in contrast to oppressive systems of power. Navigate the data with an understanding of oppressive systems of power at play within audiences, consider: white supremacy, colonization, patriarchy, homophobia, ableism
Develop specific qualitative personas to center the work and seek out those users in early research
- Examples of qualitative personas include:
  - Women and Nonbinary editors; African and South Asian editors on English and French Wikipedia; Indonesian Wikipedia users

Resources to understand markets may include:

Case Studies for the WMF Platforms

How the Android Team identified their problem space's growth markets
How the Moderators Team identified their problem space's growth markets
How the Campaigns team identified their team's problem space's markets
How the Growth market identifying their team's problem space's markets