Building the Knowledge Network WOK in 2018 continued with successful milestones
The Community of WOK in 2018 can be summarized as the third (!) year of success since launching of the app WikiMaster. We like to thank all our wokers, contributors, fans, donators and event delegates for the joint forces bringing the database of multiple choice questions linked to Wikipedia articles to be larger, stronger and more useful than ever. This social project is moving stronger into 2019!
Let's summarize some of the achievements from the WOK Community in numbers:
Downloads:
We now at the end of 2018 have passed 620000 downloads for WikiMaster. And 170000 downloads for the smaller sibling WikiFlip.
At the end of 2018, we had 457494 multiple choice questions (MCQ) in the database (compared to 400000 in end of 2017). And 54466 of them is in Arabic (21000).
In over 210000 (182000) Wikipedia articles. The Community now adds in average over 1000 questions to WOK per week with acceleration in December! Massive!
Adding MCQ from National Exams a priority
During the second half of 2018, our focus to put National Exams into WOK has amplified. We have focused on West Africa and Nigeria Curriculum putting the National Exams of JAMB into the WOK database and connect these old exam questions in the MCQ format to Wikipedia articles. The India National Exams and Arabic (Egypt) exams are also now being brought by the WOK Community into the database.- So all students in the World can access questions that help them get to higher education. This aim will be even more clear for the objectives of 2019 and going forward.
First WOK Conference held
In 2018 we created our first WikiMaster Community outside our main Office in Cairo. This WikiMaster Community was established in Nigeria after our first ever held WOK Conference in collaboration with Wikipedia Nigeria User Group, that later during 2018 became a chapter under Wikipedia (and awarded the NGO of Africa 2018). We aim for more WikiMaster Communities in 2019. The tremendous success of this event in the media gave a good pace for the rest of 2018 and in 2019.
Jimmy Wales and Erik Bolinder at Wikimania Conference.
Indexing, Indexing, Indexing. Database. Database. Database
All these questions input into the WOK need to be correct, indexed and illustrated by the members of the Community: The wokers. So the questions end up in the correct and relevant Wikipedia articles. This is not automatically made. This process is also made by the community of WOK. The amazing thing with the wisdom of crowds and the Collective Forces joining in creating something for the common good: 90K new unique tags (Wikipedia articles=wikis) were added during 2018 to the questions. A total of close to 300000 tags=wikis to the question database was added. Some large subjects like India, Science, Physics, Human Body and Biology got lots of great new questions and were indexed in questions that had not been granularly tagged. And its a process of great leaning in itself. When a question is great tagged, the knowledge from the question is set in a context. The relevance of a total of 1570841 (1369941) connections between Wikipedia articles and the WOK database of questions now exist on December 31, 2018. A huge and time-consuming effort.
But this work makes the system relevant. Devil is in the details. You can't have too many tags and you can't have too few for the context to be right. When you take a quiz in a wiki, the questions need to be relevant to the article. In small detail as well as in the large picture.
Our long-term ambition is that any knowledge written in Wikipedia will over time have multiple choice questions. This would be done much faster with the help and focus from the Wikipedia Community. With 40 million articles in 301 languages, this will take some time. But when the Wikimedia Community put their focus on something of importance like the WikiData project, the results are magical. The relation with Wikipedia was even more improved after the Lagos success of the WikiMaster Content Conference and the BBC video about the collaboration a great explanation of the win/win. The fact that WikiMaster was the only app getting access to Wikipedia working in Turkey was also a success.
Images to Questions makes the quizzes more vivid
In 2016 56K of the MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions) had an image attached from Wikimedia Commons: In 2017 over 128K had a related photo, illustration or image. At the end of 2018 over 171K of the 458K MCQs has an image related. In the Arabic part of the database 51K of 54K has an image making the app WikiMaster more vivid and interesting as well as making the app WikiFlip (that only has image related questions) more useful.
With all these efforts done; WOKers are playing Challenges and Take Quizzes at an accelerated rate: Compared to 94K in 2016, 504K Challenges was played in 2018. The Take Quiz option was used 147K times. Someone has to be the first to take a Quiz.
1.9 million questions were taken in WOK was taken in 2018, making the total taken pass 6 million. In total, these questions have generated over 100 million WOKbits! A huge landmark for the knowledge generated!
Languages need validators
In 2017 we added German, Spanish and French Questions this year to the existing English, Arabic, and Swedish parts. Some parts of WOK, such as the Swedish part are not accelerating as fast as we hoped for due to lack of content managers but the move is on. We have not generated as many new languages as we had hoped for and the "empty" factor of not having any Questions in languages is a slowing factor for the WOK Community. English and Arabic is vital growth. In October 2018, Erik Bolinder spoke at the WikiCon Conference in St. Gallen to the German Wikipedia Community in hope to get engagement from this language Community. Explaining the taste of Cappucino to coffee makers never having the taste of milk is a process. More languages need validators and resources. It will come.
Thinking Big has the advantage of planning for success. We have big goals. For sure. Content shall be relevant, fun and accurate. And the user experiences thrilling.
An encyclopedia is not built in one day. And the same with the quizzes on top. The Quizzes to all human knowledge creating the Knowledge Network WOk takes time.
New goals are set for 2019! New magic things will happen! We hope you enjoy the ride with WOK apps and the upcoming Desktop version of WikiMaster! Contribute to playing challenges and create questions and quizzes. On your mobile laptop or tablet.
Feel free to download WikiMaster and WikiFlip apps in Google Play and AppStore if not yet done. Well met in 2019!
We wish all of you a great 2019!
