Wikimedia Community Fellow Tanvir Rahman

Tanvir Rahman is a Wikimedian who serves the movement locally and globally, both on- and off-wiki. Tanvir has been an active editor of Bengali Wikipedia since 2009, he holds administrator rights on multiple projects and he was elected a steward in 2011. He also volunteers on the Small Wiki Monitoring Team, the Countervandalism Network, as an OTRS agent, and is a translator for translatewiki. Tanvir helped found Wikimedia Bangladesh and is a tireless organizer of local outreach activities to raise awareness for Wikimedia and bring new editors to the projects.

In his fellowship project, Tanvir will be experimenting with on-wiki strategies to encourage and grow the editing community on small language versions of Wikipedia, with specific focus on the Bengali Wikipedia. Smaller projects have different needs and challenges than the large language communities and may require different approaches to engage with editors. By focusing on a community like Bengali Wikipedia, which has about 50 active editors per month and sees 10 new editors per month, Tanvir hopes to learn more about the basic editing infrastructure needed to encourage new editors in new or small-scale projects. We look forward to the new insights that Tanvir’s project will bring to the Wikimedia movement. Because he understands the outreach and on-wiki needs of the editing community, cares as deeply about local community as he does about the global needs of the movement, and can’t wait to share his knowledge about smaller wiki communities, we believe those insights will be great.

Wikimedia Community Fellow Steven Zhang

Steven Zhang is a Wikipedian with a passion for resolving on-wiki disputes and helping others do the same. He has been contributing to the English Wikipedia since 2008 and has been particularly active in dispute resolution forums, including the Wikipedia Mediation Cabal. Steven is studying a Certificate IV in Mediation at Open Colleges, and over the past year he has made it his mission as a volunteer to recruit more editors to join dispute resolution efforts. In 2011, he helped create the dispute resolution notice board, an entry point for mediating disputes on the English Wikipedia. Steven has noted that there aren’t enough active participants to resolve all of the disputes that arise on Wikipedian each day, and he believes that dispute resolution processes could be streamlined to make them more accessible and efficient to all editors who need them.

We admire Steven’s enthusiasm for resolving conflict and his commitment to raising awareness in the community about the issue, and we look forward to partnering with him as he embarks on his fellowship project.  He will be analyzing community feedback and dispute resolution activity in order to build a deeper understanding of what is effective and what needs improvement in the current systems. He will also be developing a guide for new editors who want to get involved in resolving on-wiki disputes.

Steven and Tanvir will be documenting their work on-wiki and here on the Foundation blog. You can learn more about their projects by visiting the Fellows page. All of the Wikimedia Foundation Fellows look forward to meeting you at Wikimania, too!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

cc by-sa 3.0 Dilly Boase

You’ve probably heard the saying, “In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but in practice it does.” Three of the things that contribute to make Wikipedia work are topic-specific WikiProjects (“let’s write about a town), Wikimedia chapters (“let’s organize throughout the United Kingdom”), and unique ideas (“let’s use QR codes to share content”). This week these three things successfully came together to create Monmouthpedia, “The World’s First Wikipedia Town” in Monmouth, Wales.

The idea for Monmouthpedia began at a TEDx talk in Bristol when John Cummings, an occasional Wikipedia editor, suggested from the audience that the UK Chapter use QR codes to “do a whole town.” That challenge was handed to Cummings when the Wikimedia UK chapter backed the idea. He then moved to his home town of Monmouth where he assembled an ad hoc group of supporters who wanted to participate, including the local County Council.

Click image for Monmouthpedia video

The project has taken six months of preparation, including a commitment by the town to install a free, town-wide wi-fi network (the first of its kind in Wales). On 19 May the entire town will be bedecked with banners declaring Monmouth as the first Wikipedia Town in the world.

The Monmouthpedia project uses QRpedia to allow visitors to scan QR codes that link directly to the Wikipedia article in their own language. Because of Monmouth’s efforts to provide free wi-fi and implement QRpedia, the town is likely the only place where a visitor can tour in Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Welsh, or numerous other Wikipedia languages using QR codes.

A plaque on Monmouth Shire Hall

Much of the success of Monmouthpedia comes from its ability to capture the imagination of the Wikipedia community, which has embraced the town virtually. Wikipedia volunteers have contributed nearly 500 new articles in over 25 languages, as well as videos on topics such as the historic Chartists movement.

The project also has a long list of partners, including 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Wikipedia has partnered with museums and other institutions before, as in Derby, but in Monmouth you will see over 1,000 QR codes on every school, every important building, and hundreds of shops. The County Council itself has a QRpedia code in its reception that takes you to their Wikipedia article.

Lest you think this is a passing interest, the town of Monmouth is in it for the long haul. Many of the QRpedia codes are printed on ceramic plaques that should last for decades. The information in articles is backed by the Wikipedia community and will be continually improved and expanded. Physical guides and maps will become outdated, but the Wikipedia articles will always be able to be updated. This potential for on-site access to up-to-date information in any language is what makes the Monmouthpedia model so exciting.

How long can Wikipedia defy the theory and continue to deliver free information to the planet in over 280 languages? We think the Monmouthpedia story provides a very optimistic outlook.

If you want to find out more, visit the Monmouthpedia website and take a look at the associated articles on Wikipedia.

- Roger Bamkin, Director of Wikimedia UK (Victuallers)

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant

The Tulip Folly, Jean-Léon Gérôme, from the Walters Museum collection

‪The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join our collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia. ‬

‪The project began taking shape in February 2012, as part of the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). During GLAMcamp DC, a three-day conference hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., the Walters Museum worked with several Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. The basic details of the upload procedure were established during the conference, and during the weeks that followed, the uploads were conducted, monitored and tested, while collaboration continued online. ‬

‪”The Walters has gone above and beyond throughout this collaboration with the GLAM-Wiki community, working alongside Wikipedians to serve as a model for our mass image upload process,” said Lori Byrd Phillips, U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. “The release of these images will not only improve articles in Wikipedia, but will also have the potential to be used freely throughout the web.”

‪The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006. In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license. ‬

Sarasvati image from Walters Museum

‪”By uploading our information in this way, we can share items of cultural heritage from around the globe, directly with people in those parts of the world. Already our images have been used in 48 different languages. The Walters’ collection is well-suited for this project because of its size and its breadth of topic areas,” said Dylan Kinnett, Manager of Web and Social Media for the Walters Art Museum. “By developing documentation and tools for this type of work, we hope that our upload project can serve as a prototype for other cultural institutions.”

‪Already, the museum’s images have had an impact in improving content on Wikipedia, such when they are used as illustrations in entries whose topic is not the artwork itself, but a related idea, such as a mythological figure, or a time or place. The Walters’ painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, for instance, has been added to five different language Wikipedia entries about the goddess.‬

We would like to thank to the Walters Museum for their donation and their commitment to promoting free knowledge on Wikimedia Commons, and to the GLAM volunteers who helped make this endeavor possible.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

Wikipedians in Residence prepare to present at the American Association of Museums. cc by-sa 3.0 Sarah Stierch.

Because of the importance of this conference, much preparation went into bringing together five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world to represent the work of the GLAM-Wiki initiative. Liam Wyatt, Sarah Stierch, Àlex Hinojo, and I participated in both a virtual and an on-site panel titled “Wikipedia and the Museum: Lessons from Wikipedians in Residence.” Dominic McDevitt-Parks facilitated a table at the “Marketplace of Ideas” event, which focused on how museums can best share their resources with Wikipedia. Throughout the conference, the GLAM-Wiki US portal was promoted as a new tool for American museums to more easily connect with the Wikimedia community.

Highlights of our outreach included:

• For the in-person Wikipedians in Residence panel, over fifty museum professionals gathered to hear about the GLAM-Wiki initiative, the types of outreach events, the methods for connecting with the Wikimedia community and the resources for helping museums get started with a project.
• The virtual session brought together over fifty museum professionals and GLAM-Wikimedians from around the world to discuss best practices. Event organizers allowed Wikipedians free access to the event and the recorded session is now publicly accessible.
• Due to the high level of interest, all of the Wikipedians in Residence jumped in to assist with the Marketplace of Ideas table. Over a three-hour period we answered questions, shared resources and left with a number of potential new museum cooperations.

As the conference went on, it was abundantly clear that museum professionals were ready to more fully engage with the Wikimedia community. A handful of sessions independently discussed the GLAM-Wiki initiative as a model project within broader topic areas, including global partnerships within children’s museums, transparency in the future of museum ethics and “going beyond digitization.”

The AAM conference was a watershed moment for GLAM-Wikimedia collaboration. We were surprised that many people no longer needed to be convinced of Wikimedia’s relevance within their institution.  Instead, many were eager and ready to take the next step toward connecting with the Wikimedia community. As a museum professional myself, it was inspiring to directly witness the museum field wholly embracing Wikipedia as a serious tool for furthering their missions.

It has been a long time coming.

Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator

(Participation by Wikipedians in Residence in the American Association of Museums conference was made possible through the Wikimedia Participation Grants program.)

Alex Wafula, Wikipedian from Kenya

What if someone brings it to you by hand?

Alex Wafula, a Wikipedia editor and 3rd year student at Strathmore University, in Nairobi, Kenya, has helped start the Wikimedia Project for Kenyan Schools, where he and a team of volunteers travel to remote parts of Kenya to share offline Wikipedia with students. Wafula and the team install offline versions of English Wikipedia from a disc or memory stick in schools that have computers, and they have provide both teachers and students with tutorials on how to operate the database.

“I’ve always been fascinated in discovering new things and knowing why things work the way they do, like why’s the sky blue and not red, what makes planes fly and boats float etc. Now what’s even more fascinating for me is sharing this,” said Wafula.

Organizers of the project began by procuring a list of schools with computer labs from the Kenyan Ministry of Education. From that list they divided the schools into 3 distinct regions: Kakamega Town (Western Kenya), Nyeri Town (Central Kenya) and Mombasa City (South Eastern Kenya) with 10 schools per region and a total of 30 schools.

Project members were mostly based in Nairobi and traveled 7 hours by bus to reach Kakamega and Mombasa City, and 4 hours to Nyeri. The teams typically stay 5 days in each region. To reach their goal of 2 schools per day, the team utilize an assortment of transportation including mini-buses, tuk-tuks and motorbikes to travel from school to school, which in some cases are considerable distances apart.

In Kenyan public schools that have computers, Wafula said, students take turns in time-allotted sessions in the computer lab and share a single computer with as many as three other classmates. Wafula noted that some of the computers he dealt with at these labs were too old and needed repair before they could install the offline Wikipedia.

“In high school, I spent many hours reading encyclopedias and from the knowledge gained, I found hope of making something out of my life,” said Wafula. “It’s my hope that students who get access to offline Wikipedia will find hope of a better future for themselves and their families as well from the knowledge they gain.”

In 2003, education in public schools in Kenya became free and universal. According to Wafula, however, the number of students enrolled in the public school system has exceeded the capacity of the system, with as many 60 students (or more) being taught by a single teacher. Schools in rural areas lack enough desks and chairs to facilitate all the students and in some cases students attend class in half-built classrooms or under trees. Textbooks are shared between 2-4 students and school supplies are treasured commodities.

In this context, gaining access to hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles is a marvel.

“There is so much promise in these kids, despite the adversities they face,” said Wafula. “In their world full of challenges and uncertainties, I’m happy that I got to deliver one of their solutions.”

Story and reporting by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern

But there is a fourth kind of cultural and educational resource within the city that is sometimes overlooked—Washington‘s 170+ embassies and diplomatic missions. These embassies are hidden gems of knowledge, housing cultural artifacts and works of art, and hosting numerous educational and cultural events, particularly in May, which DC Mayor Vincent Gray has declared as the city’s “International Cultural Awareness Month,” in order to showcase the value these embassies bring to the city.

In an effort to capture the intellectual energy and highlight the cultural and educational resources of these international institutions, Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC) last week kicked off its Embassy Outreach Initiative (EOI) with an inaugural event held in partnership with the Washington European Society and the Estonian Embassy in Washington.

The event, hosted at the Estonian Embassy, featured a discussion on global Internet freedom efforts with Danny Weitzner, Deputy CTO for Internet Policy at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy; Chairman Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament; Ian Schuler, Senior Manager for Internet Freedom Programs at the US State Department; and Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. Adam Kushner, Deputy Editor of the National Journal, moderated the discussion.

From L to R, Weitzner, Mihkelson, Schuler, and MacKinnon. CC-BY-SA

At the heart of EOI is an effort to foster an international dialogue around Wikimedia DC’s and the Foundation’s vision. In that sense, the choice of the Estonian Embassy as the debut venue for EOI was not coincidental. Estonia currently ranks as the number one country for Internet freedom by the DC-based NGO Freedom House. Not only do tech, Internet companies, startups (think Skype) and knowledge initiatives thrive in Estonia, but so does the Estonian Wikipedia. Its nearly 95,000 articles, and 8.1 million monthly page views, may seem small compared to the English Wikipedia, but considering the country’s population stands at slightly over 1.3 million, these numbers are very substantial.

The global Wikimedia community will be coming to Washington, DC, this summer for Wikimania 2012, providing the city with an opportunity to witness how the world collaborates in pursuit of free global knowledge. Before these international delegates arrive, and long after they have returned home, Washington, DC has always been and will always remain a great place to promote international dialogue in support of shared knowledge. That is the ultimate goal of Wikimedia DC’s outreach and program efforts–like EOI and LibraryLab: they utilize the potential for collaboration that is present within the city and make a positive and lasting impact on global knowledge.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President, Wikimedia District of Columbia

Sorry, we don't mean this kind of bacon.

Bacn. If you have an account on any of the most popular websites on the Internet, you’ve probably seen it – it’s the Internet jargon for those periodic emails you receive whenever your activity on a website wanes, reminding you to come back and see what you’ve missed. There’s a Wikipedia article about it, naturally.

Unlike many other major community sites, Wikipedia doesn’t send any unsolicited reminders to its editors… but what if it did? What if a large chunk of the recent decline in editor numbers is simply due to people not being actively encouraged to come back and contribute again, like they are on virtually all other websites where people freely give their time and effort?

Our experiment

To test this hypothesis, we here at the editor engagement experiments team decided to send some bacn to former highly active Wikipedians who had stopped editing. We dubbed this experiment Necromancy. (Hat tip on the name goes to Jeff Atwood of StackExchange fame, who introduced us to Stackoverflow’s necromancy badge for reviving dead topics.)

Though we chose not to go with our data analyst’s literal necromancy-themed email idea of encouraging lapsed users to “fight the dark armies of ignorance once more!”, we did do our best to sound friendly and informal in these messages, and we addressed them from members of our team who have Wikipedia editing experience. While many Wikipedia users may be accustomed to receiving emails from automated mailer systems, we figured that sending from a person who could be directly replied to would increase our chances of not being marked as spam.

Since there is no single metric for when a Wikipedian has finally left the project, we contacted three different types of editors: those who hadn’t edited articles for one year, a second group that had been gone for three months, and a third that stopped editing for just 30 days.

The results

We had some pretty interesting results from our three rounds of email. The percentage of people who opened our emails was about 27-28 percent, slightly higher than the standard figure cited by most non-profits, about 20 percent, and definitely higher than the 5 percent open rate of marketing/sales emails.^† The number of people who clicked through to the login screen was about half that, and in our most successful round, we generated a return-to-editing rate of 5 percent.

Though the open rates stayed more or less the same among the 1-year, 3-month, and 1-month lapsed editors, rates of return to editing were higher for those who had been gone for less time. Wikipedians who haven’t edited for a year are probably gone for good, but those who were only gone for a month may just need a small reminder to jump back in again.

Conclusions and future work

So, what does this mean for editor retention? Well, we’re probably not going to start sending everyone who has ever made an edit to Wikipedia daily reminders to contribute. But, if we can expect that one email to recently lapsed editors will bring back about 5 percent and get them to edit again, and we can predict from current editor trends that about 5,000 Wikipedians will stop editing over the course of this year, this means that a little bit of bacn will prevent 250 of those Wikipedians from disappearing for good. It may not be the silver bullet that reverses editor decline, but it’s a pretty good start.

Another step toward encouraging editors to return via email has already been enabled. Unrelated to our tests, community members have worked to ensure that an editor on any Wikimedia project can opt in to receiving emails when a page on their watchlist is changed.

If you’d like to know more about our current and planned experiments, check out our documentation on Meta, feel free to comment below, or ping us on our freenode IRC channel – #wikimedia-e3

Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling,
on behalf of the Editor Engagement Experiments team at the Wikimedia Foundation

† As reported by the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study.

WikiCup image

Wikipedia editors are hardworking volunteers who have created the most extraordinary knowledge resource in history. Many contributors have made tens of thousands of edits. Some have made hundreds of thousands. But sometimes, even the most seasoned editor could do with a bit of motivation.

The WikiCup is one such source of motivation, a friendly editing competition developed by the volunteer community with the goal to improve content and make editing more fun.

The Cup runs annually from January to October, with five rounds of elimination. Points are awarded each round for contributing different types of content, including Featured Articles (FAs), Good Articles (GAs), Did You Know’s (DYKs) and Featured Lists, among other article quality categories. Administration of the event is handled by judges, who also resolve disputes and review talk page discussions. This year’s judges are Josh Milburn (User:J Milburn) and Eddie Erhart (User:The ed17), both of whom started judging in 2009.

While a lot of WikiCup contestants are already prolific editors, Erhart believes the competition is still very effective in driving content creation. “[I enjoy] seeing these editors go out and add boatloads of content to the encyclopedia,” he said. “Many would have been doing this anyway, but the Cup provides an incentive for them to do more. I think the idea of a competition is a strong motivating factor to go out and improve content.”

In this year’s WikiCup, Stefano Magliocco (User:Grapple X) led the first two rounds mostly thanks to his GAs about The X-Files and Millenium television series. He says he initially entered the Cup as a means to keep himself motivated. “I had a lot of stuff planned, but I usually find myself losing focus on things over time,” said Magliocco. “I’ve been doing a lot of work for The X-Files WikiProject, and I had planned out a lot of long-term projects. The Cup seemed like a good means of lighting a fire under my arse to get these done.”

Since Magliocco has entered the Cup, he has noticed an increase in not only the quantity, but also the quality of his contributions. “I’ve generally had a strong burst of activity at the start of each round, where my normal work rate doubles or triples,” he said. “From there, it’s really just a case of the Cup motivating me to edit better, rather than more.”

Magliocco feels that encouraging the creation of GAs is one of the main ways the WikiCup accomplishes its stated mission of improving content on Wikipedia. “I think the level of investment versus reward given for the promotion of GAs has definitely helped the project as a whole,” said Magliocco, who likes to keep track of the ratio of GAs to total articles. “At the minute, about 1 in 275 articles are of GA status, whereas it was 1 in 280 at the start of the Cup.”

Last year’s WikiCup winner, Andrew Hink (User:Hurricanehink), agreed that increasing the number of GAs is an important step in improving the quality of Wikipedia. “I think [having 500,000 GAs] is very much in the realm of possibility in the next 10 years,” he said. “As long as it’s all well-cited, all well-written, that’s a good goal to have, and it’s very doable.”

WikiCup 2011 winner Andrew Hink, playing piano

In addition to improving the quality of content on Wikipedia, the WikiCup can also help foster a sense of community between editors who might not otherwise collaborate.

“I usually stay rather insular inside the Hurricane Project,” said Hink, “so it was good to meet people outside the Project. It sometimes seems like I’m sort of in the minority — a lot of other people in Wikipedia are reviewers, administrators, vandalism fighters — it was good to see how many writers there are out there.”

Hink felt that projects like the WikiCup create a positive feedback loop for editors. “It seems like anytime someone makes a new article, someone else is like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel like writing again!’” said Hink. “When you see that people are editing, are working, are making good articles, it’s really encouraging. It’s a self-sustaining cycle.”

Despite these benefits, the WikiCup also receives its share of criticism, with some critics even calling for the Cup to be shut down. According to Erhart, the WikiCup has encountered problems with the featured article candidate (FAC) review process and the Did You Know (DYK) process. “People at FAC believed that editors motivated by the Cup were disregarding the instructions and nominating unprepared articles, while DYK was being flooded by large amounts of articles nominated by Cup participants,” said Erhart. “I have sympathy for both sides, but I think that the positive effects of the Cup outweigh both.”

According to Milburn, the Cup has evolved considerably since it was founded in 2007 (by User:Finns). It originally started as a “‘who can get the most edits’ challenge,” said Milburn, but it gradually shifted toward a greater focus on audited content. This year, the scoring system was adjusted to incentivize working on articles that feature on non-English Wikipedias, partially in response to the concern that the WikiCup encouraged participants to work on trivial articles rather than highly important ones. Milburn anticipates that in the future, there may be changes to the scoring system which will further motivate collaboration, encourage contribution to review processes, and offer bonus points for countering systemic bias.

Both Erhart and Milburn have seen the project grow considerably since they started, with 113 contestants in 2012 versus only 60 in 2009, their first year judging. Milburn is pleased that the Cup has been able to maintain such high levels of participation, since, he said, many of the more “social” projects on Wikipedia have a tendency to die down.

“The WikiCup alone cannot solve any of Wikipedia’s recurring problems, [like making] Wikipedia respected in academia,” said Milburn. “It can make contributing to the project a little more rewarding and enjoyable, and it can offer a reason to tick something off your to-do list today, rather than ‘at some point soon.’ As a project written by volunteers, this is, surely, a good thing.”

Story and reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern

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 percent) compared to other countries (UK, India, Brazil, Canada) where 90 percent 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. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.