About two weeks or so ago, Wikipedia kickstarted a fund drive. There was a call for blog begging for much-needed funding, and the response has been significant. Over $700K has been collected from almost 13,000 donors listed on 613 pages of names.
Donations are the key to the survival of Wikipedia, mainly because the philosophy of the project spurns advertisement … even the contextual Google Adsense. On October 30, Michael Snow gave a nice overview of Wikipedia’s potential commercial value in Wikipedia Signpost, a weekly Wikipedia community newsletter. Best estimates had the advertising potential capping out at $100m annually, but also included a quote from Wikipedia user Brad Patrick saying adding ads would be like “selling Greenpeace.”
Donating a few bucks to the cause is one way people contribute to the project, but the user labor needed to expand and manage content is arguably the more vital contribution. There have been a number of studies relevant to identifying the editors of the site. Jimmy Wales, by counting the number of edits, claims about half of all edits are done by 0.7% of the user base (about 500 active users). However, Aaron Swartz tried a sampling of page histories counting characters instead of edits and came up with a different result:
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
This is significant because it shifts the needed focus for design from the core group of lifers — who suffer a larger risk of permanent burnout and conservatism — to a broader group of at-large editors. If the obstacles and hindrances to participation are too great, meaningful contribution will lose these hidden resources. Things like WYSIWYG editors and the establishment of accessible niche communities may help new authors casually participate. However, the collective Wikipedia knowledge of the “Gang of 500” doesn’t prioritize these changes and in fact may be helping to shutter up the lobby by requiring clearing a higher and higher bar of project understanding. As Swartz writes:
Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even proposed.
The tools to perform such analysis are starting to pop up. WikiBlame allows a web-based search of an article for a particular phrase, most useful in figuring out which author(s) were responsible for specific wording. When tools exist to process the entire history of a page and automate analysis of an author’s contribution to visible text and interactivity, our understanding of how ad-hoc communities function will likely take a leap forward.
