If the power rests with the community, who is that volunteer community?[1] Every month, 75-80,000 individual Wikimedia accounts contribute 5+ edits to one of nearly 280 language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects, also available in a number of other languages. English Wikipedia, the most voluminous of these projects, includes about 30,000 of these contributors each month. That seems like a quite large number, but in practice five contributions to Wikipedia is actually a rather casual participation in the project: most likely these are contributions to content pages, and those contributors have very little participation in the actual community processes that govern the projects.
To find the folks most invested in the broad maintenance of the projects, we need to look at different numbers: folks who contribute 100+ edits per month, which includes about 14,000 people per month across the Wikimedia projects. On English Wikipedia, still the biggest highly active community, this includes about 3,500 individuals during any given month. For a top 10 website, this is actually a rather small community with relationships and community dynamics that have evolved over the 16 years of Wikipedia’s existence. This long history means that this relatively small community has its own practices, cultural expectations and social problems of
similar complexity to those that emerge whenever you ask groups of human beings to contribute time to an ideological effort. Moreover, multiple studies have found the community to be not very diverse when examining specific cross-sections, including less than 20% of contributors identifying as female -- so lack of diversity complicates these broader social issues.[2]
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- ↑ To find out more about these statistics, see https://stats.wikimedia.org/
- ↑ See the chapters elsewhere in the book about the gaps in certain parts of the Wikipedia community and its knowledge. Moreover, like other radically open communities on the internet, openness for participation also provides an open opportunity for abuse, which is currently a targeted focus of research and investment by the Wikimedia Foundation (see for example, Wulczyn, Ellery. Et. al. “Algorithms and insults: Scaling up our understanding of harassment on Wikipedia.” Wikimedia Foundation Blog, February 07, 2017 https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/scaling-understanding-of-harassment/ ). Part of what can contribute to bad experience on Wikimedia projects: new contributors to Wikimedia projects often have a hard time distinguishing between experienced participants who speak for the Wikimedia community, and these participants who do not have the reputation or experience to represent the community’s processes, yet declare the work of new contributor bad (or act inappropriately for a welcoming community of practice). Working with allies or advocates for your project who can build more new-contributor friendly pathways to participation and act as interpreters of the community, strengthens whatever programs you provides.
distribute” to include other forms of “openness” and “freeness”. Additionally, the community has been placing increased importance on references and attribution for knowledge as a check on both plagiarism and copyright violations, and a defensive mechanism against critics of the quality of Wikimedia content (see Stinson’s discussion in this talk:Wikimania Esino Lario. “File:Wikimania 2016 - Verifiability of Wikipedia by Alex Stinson.webm” Wikimania 2016. https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2016_-_Verifiability_of_Wikipedia_by_Alex_Stinson.webm ).
