Bringing Wikimedians into the Conversation at Libraries/Finding your allies in the Wikimedia Movement

Finding your allies in the Wikimedia Movement

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] If the power rests with the community, who is that volunteer community?^[4] 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.^[5] With all of this social activity online, Wikipedia could be described as a social network of sorts: for example, different parts of the Wikimedia movement have developed offline or in-person methods of working together. Sometimes this takes the form of informal meetup groups, where folks get together for beers, coffee, editing activities or photo scavenger hunts. Increasingly this organization happens in the form of more formal working groups focused on outreach and participation campaigns, and community organizations formally recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation as representatives of a local community, called affiliates.

Though participating as an individual in the Wikimedia Community has a low threshold for entry, doing more than common content contributions necessitates a certain kind of organization and relationship between contributors. For formal organizations, such as libraries, wanting to not just contribute small amounts of content, but to take advantage of and participate in the Wikimedia community, navigating the community and culture of the Wikimedia projects can be complicated. Working with affiliates or at least finding an individual Wikimedia contributor to help interface with other experienced volunteers lowers the barrier for participation in the community, allowing the Wikimedia-experienced partner to provide community expertise while the organizational partner brings their knowledge and network.

Historically communities of Wikipedia editors have grown up organically and independently, with little intentional cohesion. However there are increasing efforts, around the world, to grow local editing communities around specific interest groups, volunteer groups, and educational initiative into more formal organizations, called “affiliates”. Wikimedia affiliates principally come in two major types: user groups and chapters.^[6] Both of these organization types function as conduits for building relationships between local volunteer communities and potential partners and collaborators, including libraries.

In certain parts of the world, Wikimedia communities have formed relatively strong Wikimedia affiliates, called chapters, which are non-profit organizations -- many of which are in Europe -who represent the aims of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia projects, and the local Wikimedia community, and frequently have small professional staffs that provide different kinds and levels of support to the local communities. Many of these organizations have formed in response to the need for formal support of partnership with educational or heritage organizations, but they also provide other kinds of support for those communities, from organizing events to supporting communications, from outreach or lobbying to providing funds used by local volunteer organizers.^[7]

In parts of the world with less overlap of culture, language, country and geography, or in countries like the United States, Australia and Canada, where the the contributors to one project might be spread across very wide distance, regional communities, national affiliates or chapters have less cohesion or influence, or where the volunteer community doesn’t have organizational capacity, another solution is needed. Instead, there are often small meetup groups, or the slightly more formal “user group” -- an informal organization recognized as gathering for developing specific activities in a scope and eligible for small grants and other support from the Wikimedia Foundation.^[8]

However, many Wikimedia/pedia contributors are not aware of these organizations, or are satisfied contributing to Wikipedia or another Wikimedia project as an individual volunteer independent of these organizations.^[9] Wikipedia editors are as diverse as the encyclopedia; they edit and may or may not have any interest in collaborating on projects beyond the interests that original brought them to the projects -- for example, a subject area, or addressing specific grammatical errors. Therefore libraries wishing to engage with Wikipedia contributors should not necessarily turn to the most active online editors, as they may have no desire to be part of formal projects or take on any additional responsibility.

For library organizations who want to get involved in Wikimedia projects, reaching out to one of these organized affiliates is frequently the best course of action: they often have technical experience organizing events or projects in their region, and can find the right resources to provide guidance and training to cultural professionals.^[10] But if you can’t find a local affiliate, we recommend trying several tactics:

● First, search to find if local editors or contributors have hosted meetups via the Meetup listing page.^[11] Organizers or participants of meetups can often also host events with local partners.

● Reach out through social media channels and/or other networks asking for someone who has Wikimedia experience. Though having someone locally available is often a good start, you may not find someone local who is also interested in supporting outreach or programmatic activities -- increasingly library communities have at least one or two library professionals in their own network, who have run Wikipedia editathons or Wikipedia education assignments. Sometimes best support will come from aligned professionals.

● Reaching out to the closest affiliate in your language context and ask them to help you find a more local Wikimedian. They will likely use several tactics for searching out community members:

○ Local Wikimedia chapters often have a directory of trained or experienced volunteers who are capable of effectively training new editors -- even in nearby regions outside their scope.

○ The part of the Wikimedia community that does outreach is relatively well connected, as a social network, so they may know someone in your region through an unconventional method.

○ Using categories and user templates to find active users who either self identify as being from a particular region, or participate in editing topics relevant to your context.^[12]

○ If you are organizing an event or gathering, you can solicit a Geonotice, which places a banner on the Watchlist of people who sign in within your geographic area without exposing their location to the message sender.^[13]

In most parts of the world, these requests will find someone who can connect you to contributors in your local context. If you don’t find these networks responsive, there are an increasing number of Facebook groups and mailing lists that can connect you with the larger network working at the intersection of cultural heritage (GLAM - Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and the Wikimedia Community, including a Wikipedia + Libraries Group, that can help you find fellow librarians or supporters who can work with you remotely.^[14]

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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 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​ ).
4. To find out more about these statistics, see ​https://stats.wikimedia.org/​
5. 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.
6. Though there is also a “thematic group” option -- non-profits without a geographical scope, but rather a thematic scope. However, there is only one such organization in the world (Amical Wikimedia in Catalonia). For more information about the structure of each of these movement organization models and their governance structure, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates/Models
7. For more description of the chapters, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters
8. For more description of the user groups, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_user_groups
9. ​At the time of writing, the Wikimedia Foundation is in the process of developing a movement wide strategic direction -- one of the likely results of this more cohesive direction, will be a clearer inspiration and objectives of this network of formal organizations in the Wikimedia movement -- making it easier for contributors and heritage professional to identify if their needs can be met by movement organizations. For more information about the direction see: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017
10. To find your local affiliate, we recommend starting at the portal at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates​ . Some communities have designated particular contacts for GLAMs, this list (not as well maintained) can be found at: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Contact_us
11. Find meetup listings for English-focused projects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup
12. Though this information is very public, most of it is going to be out of date, since it has accrued over the last 16 years of the community. To find Wikimedians who identify in your geography, check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_by_location​ . To find Wikimedians active in a geographically focused editing Project, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geographical_WikiProjects​ . Also, you may be able to find editors by looking at the history of articles relevant to your local context.
13. The Instructions for Geonotices can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
14. For the active communication channels, see the listing at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Mailing_lists