Nine out of ten Wikipedians continue to be men: Editor Survey

 

Posted by Ayush Khanna on April 27th, 2012

As part of the Wikimedia Movement strategic plan, regular surveys among Wikipedia editors are an important way to take the pulse of the community and identify pressing concerns and needs. We are happy to share results from the second editor survey that was conducted in December 2011. We began survey efforts in April 2011, and results from the first survey are available here. We would like to point out that although this blog post and the following ones will be looking at some trends across the April and December survey, 7-8 months is a rather short time to see statistically significant change on important indicators like gender distribution resulting from Wikimedia Foundation initiatives. Here is some demographic data about Wikipedia editors:

a. Wikipedia editors continue to be predominantly men

The gender distribution of Wikipedia editors hasn’t changed since the last survey. Among those surveyed, 90 percent self-identified as males, 9 percent as females and 1 percent as transsexual or transgender. That being said, there was a greater amount of female editors among those respondents who had joined more recently: Among editors who had joined in 2011, 14 percent were female compared to 10 percent for 2010, 9 percent for 2009 and 8 percent for editors who had joined in 2008 and participated in this survey. Possible explanations include that Wikipedia has been attracting a higher ratio of women recently, or that female editors leave the project sooner. There were no significant variations across the major language Wikipedias, with the exception of the Russian Wikipedia, which reported only 6 percent female editors. Also, out of all editors in the US, 15 percent are women, which is significantly higher than any other country of residence. Conversely, there are fewer male editors in US (85%) compared to other countries (UK, India, Brazil, Canada) where 90% or more of editors are males.  With initiatives like the Teahouse project that engages new editors through outreach, we hope to increase the number of female editors on Wikipedia.

(D15) What is your gender? (n=6503)

D15. What is your gender? n=6503

b. English Wikipedia continues to be the most read and edited Wikipedia

As we had found in the April 2011 survey, a large majority of Wikipedia editors read and edit the English version. Many editors that primarily make edits to another language Wikipedia also edit the English Wikipedia. While only 30 percent primarily edit the English Wikipedia, 63 percent contribute to it. Almost half of English Wikipedia editors reported other language Wikipedias as their primary project. Similarly, 86 percent of Wikipedia editors read the English Wikipedia, though only 38 percent read it primarily.

Q1a. Which language versions of Wikipedia do you CONTRIBUTE to? Please choose all that apply.

Q1b. Which language version of Wikipedia do you PRIMARILY CONTRIBUTE to? Please choose ONE.

Q2a. Which language versions of Wikipedia do you READ? Please choose all that apply.

Q2b. Which language version of Wikipedia do you PRIMARILY READ? Please choose ONE.

If you are interested learning more about Wikipedia editors – from age demographics to their editing experiences, please check out this space as we publish the long-awaited topline findings from the survey. Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development In December 2011, we conducted an online survey of Wikipedia editors in 17 languages. This is the first in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings

The power of free knowledg

Posted by Geoff Brigham on March 30th, 2012

Photo: Lane Hartwell, CC-BY-SA

After the recent SOPA/PIPA blackout, many media outlets characterized the debate as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood for clout in Washington DC. Lost in this myopic narrative is the truth: the millions of regular Internet users who called and wrote their congressional representatives were giving a collective voice to their individual demands that Congress not enact legislation, written by industry, that would harm the free and open web. They spoke up to support those innovative websites and online communities that are possible only through a free exchange of ideas and information.
Congress, the media, and many others do not always understand or appreciate the meaning and power of the free-knowledge movement, nor the community that nurtures and supports it. For this reason, we offer a summary on free knowledge. Much will be familiar to Wikimedia project contributors and our peers in the free-knowledge community, but we hope to say something useful for our other readers — and legislators — who have not previously explored the issue or who have found themselves surprised by the backlash when they have ignored it.
As you can guess, we are quite protective of the Internet, which is a great facilitator of the free-knowledge movement, and we are suspicious when others seek to ram through legislation in their private interests without proper reflection on the values that are vital to our mission.

Kids these days: the quality of new Wikipedia editors over time

Posted by Aaron Halfaker on March 29th, 2012

The proportion of quality newcomers over time. (2006-2011)

As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bots and automated tools, which started in 2006.
For those of us studying editor trends, the following question has continued to puzzle us: did the change in communications to new users lead to the decline, or can the rise in warnings be explained by a decrease in quality contributions from new users? Perhaps, as some Wikipedians have argued, the new users of today are being reverted and warned more aggressively than those who entered the project in 2001-2006 because their edits are qualitatively worse (e.g., more self-promotional or spammy, less serious and encyclopedic) than those of previous generations of editors.
While the complexity involved in determining what constitutes a “good” contributor to Wikipedia may never allow us to definitively answer this question, our research argues against the theory that today’s newbies just plain suck.

The proportion of rejection for quality newcomers over time.

To test the hypothesis that new contributors who entered the project in recent years have been more harmful and less interested in positively contributing to the encyclopedia, we randomly sampled the first edits of newcomers to the English Wikipedia from the earliest days of the project to the present. With the help of some experienced Wikipedians, we hand-categorized the edits of 2,100 new users according to a four point quality scale – blatant vandal (obscene language, obvious vandalism), bad faith (jokes and nonsense), good faith poor-quality edit (bad formatting, unreferenced, but trying to add value), and golden (good faith good edits that should not be reverted).
What we found was encouraging: the quality of new editors has not substantially changed since 2006. Moreover, both in the early days of Wikipedia and now, the majority of new editors are not out to obviously harm the encyclopedia (~80 percent), and many of them are leaving valuable contributions to the project in their first editing session (~40 percent). However, the rate of rejection of all good-faith new editors’ first contributions has been rising steadily, and, accordingly, retention rates have fallen. What this means is that while just as many productive contributors enter the project today as in 2006, they are entering an environment that is increasingly challenging, critical, and/or hostile to their work. These latter findings have also been confirmed through previous research.

Survival rate of newcomers over time.

This study has many important implications for community and Wikimedia Foundation efforts to engage and retain new editors. To begin, it reasserts the centrality of one fundamental policy on the project, “Assume good faith.” This research strongly supports efforts in the community and at the Foundation to do a better job of integrating new editors into Wikipedia and its sister projects, not simply for the sake of gaining new editors, but for the quality of these new editors’ contributions overall.
At the Foundation level, this includes major software changes like the creation of a visual editor to lower the technical barrier to entry, as well as more experimental pilot projects like template A/B testing, an attempt to make the template messages received by new users more personalized and clear, and the Teahouse, which gives new users a friendly, low-pressure space to seek help from experienced Wikipedians. With better software and an inviting and supportive atmosphere, the encyclopedia can continue to grow both in quality of material and quantity of dedicated contributors.

• Find out more about this study at Research:Newcomer quality
• This work is part of a journal article in submission to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on Wiki Research
• A special thanks to R. Stuart Geiger from UC Berkeley, as well as Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Oliver Keyes from the Wikimedia Foundation, for their assistance with this study.

Aaron Halfaker,
Wikimedia Foundation Research Analyst and University of Minnesota PhD candidate

Advocate for women in open source to keynote 2012 Wikimania

 

Posted by Nicholas Michael Bashour on March 29th, 2012

Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC), the organizer of Wikimania 2012, has announced that Mary Gardiner will keynote the opening session of Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC on July 12.  Gardiner is the co-founder of The Ada Initiative(TAI) and an important advocate for women in open source and open culture.
This announcement builds on WikiWomen’s History Month, a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation, TAI, and OCLC. It shows a commitment by the Wikimedia community to make women’s participation in tech and wikis a central goal moving forward.
“Wikimania’s choice of Mary Gardiner says that the Wikipedia community is moving on from asking ‘Is the underrepresentation of women a problem?’ to asking ‘What can we do to increase the representation of women?’,” said Valerie Aurora, a co-founder of TAI and an open source developer.

Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner. Photo: Mary Gardiner, CC-BY-SA

Aurora noted that it has taken a while for one of the world’s largest open source communities to view the issue in that light. “Many people have worked hard for several years to get the community to pay serious attention to the gender gap. Now it’s starting to look like they have succeeded, and we can start having a conversation on what to do to close the gender gap.”
Wikimania 2012 presents a great opportunity to do just that. Gardiner is the first female keynote speaker at a Wikimania. Many of the over 400 submissions we received were made by female contributors, with several focusing specifically on the role of women in the Wikimedia movement. In addition, AdaCamp DC, an unconference event, will coincide with the Wikimania 2012 Hackathon/Pre-Conference Developer Days on July 10-11.
Both Gardiner and Aurora are excited for the opportunity to connect with the global community. ”We will have quite a few experts on Wikipedia and related projects at this year’s AdaCamp,” says Aurora, “and I am looking forward to seeing what they think up.”
To top it all off, Washington DC is home to one of the most active communities of women in tech anywhere in the world, with groups such as Women in Technology and DC Web Women present in the area. All of this makes Wikimania 2012 a perfect opportunity to raise awareness of the important role of women in tech, open source and wikis.
Thank you,
Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow, Wikimedia Foundation and member of the Ada Initiative Advisory Board

Wikipedia's tin-cup approach wears thin

 The nonprofit website needs to raise funds, but it resists selling ads.

March 10, 2008|Alana Semuels | Times Staff Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — The new headquarters of one of the world's most popular websites is 3,000 square feet of rented space furnished with desks and chairs bought on the cheap from EBay and Craigslist.
A sheet of printer paper taped to the door says the office belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the online almanac of anything and everything that users want to chronicle, from Thomas Aquinas to Zorba the Greek.

With about 300 million page views a day, the site by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn't. Wikipedia's business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often.
When it comes to money, "we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be," Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office, the foundation's home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. "It's time for us to grow up a little bit."
Growing up can be hard to do.
Wikipedia, the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," is stuck in a weird Internet time warp, part grass-roots labor of love, part runaway success.
A global democracy beloved by high school term paper writers and run largely by volunteers, the site is controlled for now by people who seem to view revenue with suspicion and worry that too much money -- maybe even just a little money -- would defile and possibly ruin the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the written word.
"Imagine if the other top 10 websites in the world, like Yahoo or Google, tried to run their budgets by asking for donations from 14-year olds," said Chad Horohoe, a 19-year-old college student in Richmond, Va., who was until recently a Wikipedia site administrator, one of the 1,500 or so people authorized to delete pages or block users from making changes to articles. "It isn't sustainable."
Looking at it one way, it's cheap to run Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation's other endeavors, which include an online compendium of quotations and a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus. The annual budget is $4.6 million, more than half of it dedicated to 300 computer servers and other equipment. On the other hand, the foundation has a tough time raising a few million dollars. The last fundraising campaign featured a video of co-founder Jimmy Wales literally wringing his hands in desperation.
The 45,000 or so individuals who contribute annually give an average of $33 each, so campaigns, which are conducted online, raise only about one-third of what's needed.
For the rest, foundation directors have to hit up outside donors, such as Stephen J. Luczo of Seagate Technology and U2's Bono.
Recent money-making proposals include a Wikipedia television game show, a Wikipedia board game and Wikipedia T-shirts. Gardner said that a board game might by OK but that a game show would be problematic, because game shows are competitive and Wikipedia is collaborative.
How about selling advertising space like most big-time websites do? Don't go there unless you want to start a Wikipedian riot. Some members of the foundation's board of trustees and most of the site's editors and contributing writers zealously oppose advertising but they agreed to advertise on organisation's "not so-important sites" like its official blog- Helpwiki (helpwikiblog.blogspot.com)

After a staff member in 2002 raised the possibility in the Wikipedia community, a facet of the Spanish-language branch quit and created the forever ad-free Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Espanol. Its founders said that advertising "implied the existence of a commercialization of the selfless work of volunteers."
Ads would be "threatening to Wikipedia's neutrality," said Michael Bimmler, a 16-year-old high school student who has been a contributor for more than four years and is president of the foundation's Swiss chapter. Readers would be suspicious about articles if ads were near them, he said, and would wonder why certain articles were longer than others. Besides, he added, ads are ugly.
The debate over Wikipedia's future took a tabloid turn last week when gossip sites started buzzing over allegations by former Wikipedian Danny Wool, who recently launched Veripedia, which says it authenticates Wikipedia articles. Wool posted on his blog claims that co-founder Wales had, among other things, been imprudent with Wikipedia funds, asking the foundation to pay for visits to massage parlors and other non-Wikipedia-related activities.

As those allegedly scandalous tidbits zoomed around the Internet, the website Antisocialmedia.net (which says it is in the business of "exposing user-generated discontent") got the attention of the blogosphere when it posted a rant about Wales supposedly having fiddled with one Wikipedia article on behalf of a girlfriend before he broke up with her and doctoring another in exchange for a $5,000 donation. Tech industry gossip site Valleywag got involved by posting what appeared to be instant message exchanges between Wales and the ex-girlfriend, political commentator Rachel Mardsen, who put some of his clothes up for sale on EBay.
Wales and Wikimedia said he had never misused foundation funds, and Wales posted a statement online saying that he cared deeply about Wikipedia's integrity and would never abuse it. Gardner said in a statement that Wales "has consistently put the foundation's interests ahead of his own."

In San Francisco, Gardner said that she wasn't planning wholesale changes as executive director, and that her first task was to "fix the basics and get the house in order."
Gardner, a petite woman with black hair and a tattoo of a black widow spider on her wrist, joined Wikipedia nine months ago after leaving Canadian Broadcasting Co., where she oversaw the introduction of advertising on its website. She said she didn't foresee a time when Wikipedia would go that route, though she added that she should never say never.
So far, Gardner has hired a staff lawyer, an accountant and a head of business development. She has created a travel policy, reimbursement policy and code of conduct for employees and instituted criminal background checks for potential hires (Wikimedia got unwanted publicity after a technology site revealed in December that the foundation's chief operating officer until July had been convicted of theft, drunk driving and fleeing a car accident before being hired.)
Now comes the hard part: money.
The foundation makes some -- less than 2% of its budget -- from ways other than flat out asking for it, Gardner said. For instance, it licenses the Wikipedia logo to companies such as Nokia, which used it to advertise a new phone, and it charges websites such as Answers.com for real-time feeds with page updates.
"The most difficult issue for a nonprofit is always how to raise money in ways which are consistent with the mission," Gardner said, "and don't distract too much from the mission-related work."
In the early days, funding wasn't a problem. Wales helped launched Wikipedia in 2001 with money he made through Bomis Inc., a Web portal known for directing users to pictures of women and celebrities, clothed and unclothed. By February 2004, the English-language Wikipedia had nearly 250,000 alphabetized articles. Today the English version has more than 2 million articles.
Global interest in the volume of information -- and the fact that it's free -- helped the site grow from the 100th most visited in 2005 to the ninth most visited now, according to Web-traffic tracker Alexa.
Decisions, financial and otherwise, are made by the Wikimedia Foundation board, whose seven directors include Wales, a French plant geneticist, a classical bassoonist studying law in Virginia and an Italian computer programmer. Most board members are nominated and elected, via e-mail debate and balloting, by Wikipedia editors and contributors.
As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. "Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years," said Nathan Awrich, a 26-year-old Wikipedia editor from Vermont who supports advertising.

Outsiders find it hard to see how the site can avoid selling ad space.
"They either have to charge people or run ads, or both," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in consumer behavior online.
E-mail traffic among Wikipedia contributors shed light on the depth of financing anxiety and the details that cause angst. One worried about the tax implications of the site accepting more than $200 from any individual. Another complained about a proposal to give T-shirts to donors. Wrote one person: "All of this fundraising talk is very nice and dandy, but it sounds like plans for the local glee club, not an international foundation."
Foundation Director Erik Moeller said the foundation had to be "very, very careful with the kinds of deals we want to make" to sustain itself.
"We don't want to endanger the mission by entering into deals that would conflict with it," said Moeller, a German technology writer who was elected to the foundation board in 2006 and named director last year.
Some people have abandoned Wikipedia for Wikipedia-like companies and organizations, including Citizendium and Veripedia, and speak of joining Google's yet-to-be-launched "knol" project. Co-founder Wales started a for-profit that operates a Google-like search engine and allows users to write Wikipedia-like articles. Wales' site, called Wikia, runs ads.
Wales said that the free culture movement, as it's called, has to think creatively if it wants to keep spreading information to computers around the world.
"There are some real problems with a nonprofit structure," he said. "One of the basic problems is funding: We can get enough money to survive but don't really have the funding to push forward or innovate."