The view from Wikipedia: My hopes for the next decade in technology
Toby Negrin is the Chief Product Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. He has nearly 20 years of experience of integrating data, research, and design to produce popular products that users love — including former roles at Yahoo and DeNA. You can follow him on Twitter at @tnegrin.
Today is Wikipedia’s 19th birthday. When Wikipedia first began back in 2001, none of us could have predicted its rise to becoming one of the top websites in the world. Over the span of nearly two decades, we’ve not only established the planet’s largest encyclopedia in history — we’ve also pioneered a model for a socio-technical platform that is ethical, collaborative, and community-driven at a global level.
Now, we’re at the edge of a new decade, facing unprecedented questions about the role of technology in information, education, and community. It seems lately that we’ve been inundated by dire predictions of what the 2020s will hold. But I work for Wikipedia, and I’m an optimist by nature.
Mother Jones recently named Wikipedia as one of its Heroes of the 2010s, saying: “…while the internet mostly got worse, [Wikipedia] kept getting better, reminding us that the web can be a good thing, a place where we have instant access to endless information, a true project of the commons at a political moment when the very idea of the mutual good is under assault.”
Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but we are transparent, honest, and humble about where we’ve been and where we’re going. I believe Wikipedia is an example of the potential the internet offers. Over the next decade, if we as creators and consumers of the internet are intentional and collaborative, we can more fully realize this potential.
“I believe Wikipedia is an example of the potential the internet offers.”
Based on inspiring trends I’ve seen during my tenure at Wikimedia, I have my own predictions — my hopes — for how we build an internet and a future that we want to see in this new digital age. These are the things I hope to see for our industry when I look back come 2029:
1. Web platforms will compete on privacy and integrity.
In today’s world, personal information is the product, and many web platforms draw their value from how much information they collect (and share) about their users. As a user, you have little to no understanding of or control over how much data you’re sharing with every click.
At the Wikimedia Foundation, privacy is one of our core values. Anyone, anywhere can read Wikipedia without a login or password. We don’t follow you as you fall down the Wikipedia rabbit hole because we believe that privacy is a fundamental right that sustains freedom of expression.
In the next decade, I hope that growing public awareness about personal data will transform the technology industry, just as demand for improved safety and reliability standards drove the automotive industry in the 70s and 80s.
In this way, privacy will become a competitive differentiator, and tech platforms will work to ensure users can make informed choices about the services they use and the data they share. Companies will be as accountable to their users as they are to their shareholders. Market value will be intrinsically tied to digital social responsibility, and the most successful companies will be the ones that are the most transparent.
2. Technology is no longer treated as neutral — and creators are more intentional about their impact.
When I started my career building telecommunications hardware in the 90s, the pervading sentiment was that technology is neutral — meaning the underlying systems and infrastructure weren’t good or bad, even though their uses might be. You could use technology to talk with your mom in Japan, or you could also use the technology to hack into a company’s servers and steal personal information. Either way, tech providers, generally speaking, felt (and some still do feel) “it’s not our problem how people use our platforms.”
My hope is that in the future, the builders of the internet do realize these things are our problem, and that we need to have solutions built into the fabric of technology that allow users to make informed choices about their privacy, be defended from hackers, and have agency over how their data is used.
What if users could make a choice about how and when their device could communicate, so that digital footprints weren’t automatically tracked and stored? What if connectivity worked more like a light switch, easy and intuitive to turn off and on? Everyone likes being able to see at night, but there’s something magical about a candlelight dinner. The same can be said for the ability to disconnect and go offline at will.
Providing these kinds of choices may not be easy, but it’s not impossible. As creators and developers, we need to decide if that type of personal choice is valuable … and in the next decade, I think we will. We’ll solve these challenges with a combination of awareness of the risks of the internet with increased responsibility from its creators.
3. Instead of enabling division and fragmentation, the internet will once again become a powerful tool to help us mobilize around global issues.
One of the major headlines over the past year was that, for the first time, more than half of the people in the world came online. In the coming decade, that number will surely continue to climb. With that growth, my hope is that bringing everyone together regardless of wealth, language, or location will become a reality, instead of just a feel-good soundbite.
I’ve already seen examples of this in my own team’s work. With technical tools to support knowledge in 300 languages and counting, we ensure that anyone, anywhere can add and access knowledge about the world. When we build systems that are more inclusive and more representative, we strengthen the information we share and the ways in which we learn and connect with others.
As even more people come online, imagine the possibilities for collaboration and change across borders and governments. Take the recent Climate Strike, for example — millions of people in countries around the world walked out of their schools and workplaces to demonstrate for urgent action on climate change. I believe that kind of collaboration — and impact — will increasingly become the norm.
The internet of the 2010s has been widely regarded as a place of discord and division. The internet of the 2020s will become a platform to inspire collective action on a massive scale. It will connect more people in more countries than ever before, and be our primary method of collaborating to solve real world problems and drive large scale systems change.
Over the next ten years, we have an opportunity to put more intention and purpose behind the innovation we fund, the products we buy, and the technology we build. Together, we will join in the shared responsibility that leads to a better internet for all.
What are your hopes for the internet in the next decade?
