When you participate in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms, such as Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata or Wikisource, it’s important to understand that these platforms operate as part of a vast and complex social movement. When approaching Wikimedia, it is important to account for a rarely understood, and fundamental premise for Wikipedia and its contributor community: there is very little formal hierarchy or structure, and the many different segments of the community have different forms of power and varying levels of influence over the projects. Many activities and projects within Wikimedia communities are entirely volunteer led, some of those volunteers may be working with support or funding from the Wikimedia Foundation or local Wikimedia chapters, and even others are working on projects developed by other stakeholder groups, such as education institutions, research communities or cultural heritage organizations -- the last of which is the focus of this chapter.
Wikipedia’s barriers for participation are fairly low: in most parts of the community, almost anyone can contribute to the content pages, discuss content policies and even contribute patches to the software; many of these spaces have checks and balances on this openness, such as the software itself, which has a number of community and Wikimedia Foundation-controlled review mechanisms, or the mechanism for controversial topics and high visibility spaces, like the front page of Wikipedia, to be blocked from editing except by more experienced editors or elected administrators.[1]
The low barrier to entry means that every month nearly 20,000 new accounts register on Wikimedia projects, and English Wikipedia alone has 130-140,000 accounts making at least one edit per month. In this context, even the formal organizations that support the Wikimedia community, such as the Wikimedia Foundation who controls the trademarks and servers that keep the websites operating, have almost no control of the governance, editorial practices or decision making that creates the content on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and other Wikimedia projects--except for defining the terms of use for participation and a privacy policy.[2]
This governance power is distributed across the volunteer community through broad principles and practices of contributor-consensus, neutrality and verifiability.[3]
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- ↑ To find protected pages, look for various coloured locks in the right top-hand corner of a page. By clicking on the lock, you can learn which of nearly a dozen criteria and protection strategies are being used on that page, as part of the “Page Protection Policy”: . Typically these are high profile pages (the main page for example), or high profile content prone to vandalism or debate (the Palestine-Israel conflict, the pages of recent U.S. Presidents), or pages highly visible to prank-prone high school students (music or movie stars, subjects taught in school, etc)). To learn about the protection policy, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
- ↑ In part this is a legal defensive mechanism, that protects Wikipedia and the formal organizations behind hosting the content under internet liability laws like Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in part this is historical artefact from the open-internet philosophy that attracted contributors to the projects.
- ↑ The core values for Wikipedia are often described in the 5 pillars of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars. However, in practice, other values tend to take even more precedence expanding on the pillar “Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and
