A Taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps for Wikimedia Projects (Second Draft)

In January 2019, prompted by the Wikimedia Movement's 2030 strategic direction, the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation identified the need to develop a knowledge gaps index -- a composite index to support the decision makers across the Wikimedia movement by providing: a framework to encourage structured and targeted brainstorming discussions; data on the state of the knowledge gaps across the Wikimedia projects that can inform decision making and assist with measuring the long term impact of large scale initiatives in the Movement. After its first release in July 2020, the Research team has developed the second complete draft of a taxonomy of knowledge gaps for the Wikimedia projects, as the first step towards building the knowledge gap index. We studied more than 250 references by scholars, researchers, practitioners, community members and affiliates -- exposing evidence of knowledge gaps in readership, contributorship, and content of Wikimedia projects. We elaborated the findings and compiled the taxonomy of knowledge gaps in this paper, where we describe, group and classify knowledge gaps into a structured framework. The taxonomy that you will learn more about in the rest of this work will serve as a basis to operationalize and quantify knowledge equity, one of the two 2030 strategic directions, through the knowledge gaps index.