Figure 1. One of the feedback forms tested in the AFTv5 experiments (Option 1).

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) in October 2011. The original version of the tool, which allows readers to rate articles based on a star system, launched in 2010. The new version invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. We hope that this tool will contribute to the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goals of increasing participation and improving quality.

Testing new feedback forms

On December 22, 2011, we started testing three different designs for the AFTv5 feedback forms:

• Option 1: Did you find what you were looking for? (shown above)
• Option 2: Make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question
• Option 3: Rate this article

The purpose of this first experiment was to measure the type, usefulness and volume of feedback posted with these feedback forms. For example, does asking a reader to describe what they were looking for (option 1) provide more actionable feedback than asking them to make a suggestion (option 2)?

We enabled AFTv5 on a small, randomly selected set (0.6%) of articles on the English Wikipedia, as well as a second set of high-traffic or semi-protected articles. A feedback form, randomly selected from the above three options, was placed at the bottom of each page. The feedback form was also accessible via a link docked on the bottom right corner of the page.  The resulting comments were then analyzed along a number of dimensions.

What we learned

We conducted several studies to research these key research questions:

• Is this feedback useful to Wikipedia editors?
• How much feedback is posted for each option?
• What do readers think of these feedback forms?

To answer these questions we ran an editorial evaluation of the feedback’s usefulness, an analysis of overall feedback volume, as well as a reader survey and usability study.

Is feedback useful?

Figure 2. Proportion of feedback marked as useful by design and by level of agreement. (Option 1 is shown in green, option 2 in red and option 3 in orange).

We performed several rounds of blind assessment of the usefulness and type of feedback that we collected. To that end, a dozen Wikipedia editors volunteered to “hand code” hundreds of feedback posts: we are very grateful for their help, without which this analysis would not have been possible.

Overall, 45% of the feedback we examined was found useful by all coders (“everyone” in figure 2, middle column). About 65% of the feedback evaluated was marked as useful by at least one coder (“someone” in figure 2, left column).  We also compared the usefulness of feedback collected via each feedback form, but we couldn’t find any significant differences between the three options.

Examples of feedback marked as useful include:

• This synopsis has the characters Nic and Jules reversed. (The Kids Are Alright)
• What is failure theory? Discuss its importance enumerate various failure theories and mention their field of application. (Positive psychology)

There were, of course, feedback posts that were not useful, such as

• This guy is gorgeous, get one of the 5 million good pictures of Rick would ya? (Rick Santorum)
•  I wish martin luther king jr was alive because the untied states would not be like this if martin luther king jr had died (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Results of this initial feedback evaluation are encouraging – almost half of all comments in the randomly selected sample were judged to be useful in helping to improve the encyclopedia. There are, however, going to be differences when it comes to the feedback associated with individual articles.  For example, we found that feedback quality from the random sample was higher (45% useful) than a smaller sample of popular and/or controversial articles (33% useful).  One possible explanation for this result is that the 115 articles we hand-picked were high-traffic and/or semi-protected pages (e.g. Barack Obama), which tend to attract a higher proportion of abusive feedback and irrelevant posts.

How much feedback is posted for each option?

Figure 3. This box plot shows how many feedback posts with text were collected per day for each option (random sample only). Users are randomly assigned to one of the three options when they first visit an article in the sample. Overall, Option 1 outperformed the other 2 options (the difference between Option 1/Option 2 and Option 3 is significant).

Since the launch of AFTv5 we collected nearly 30,000 feedback posts from the random sample (averaging at 360 posts per day over the last month, about 70% of which including text).  We observed that the vast majority of AFTv5 feedback (95%) was posted by anonymous users, which is consistent with our design goals for this feature and with what we found in AFTv4. We also observed that of the three feedback form designs, option 1 and option 2  generated significantly more posted comments than option 3.

Finally, we found that AFTv5 outperforms AFTv4 in terms of volume of feedback posted.  Part of this is due to the fact that we included a feedback link docked at the lower right-hand corner of the browser window.

What do readers think of these feedback forms?

To learn what Wikipedia readers thought of the Article Feedback Tool when using it, we ran a short survey with people who had just posted feedback. A total of 1,472 people filled out that survey, with generally favorable responses: 64 percent found the feedback forms useful, on average. Option 1 and Option 3 were tied, with 66 percent approval for each, while 59 percent liked Option 2.

To understand how typical users view the article feedback process, we also ran a small usability study with four users recruited through usertesting.com. Participants were invited to test one of the feedback forms, then give suggestions on how the designs could be improved. This enabled our product team to refine the user interface design by watching video screencasts of their experience, and hearing their reactions. Overall, users found the feedback process pretty clear, but some were not sure how to edit articles.

Selecting a “winner”

After comparing the results of these various studies, we observed a slight overall preference for Option 1 (even though the other two options were also found useful). For that reason, we decided to optimize our design for Option 1 in the next phase of development. We will keep all other options in mind as we refine our design for the next version of this tool, and will consult with members of our community at each step of the way.

What’s next

We are now working to make this feedback process more useful to editors and readers alike. Here are some of the features we plan to release and test in coming weeks:

New feedback links

Starting this week, we will test two new feedback links to invite more participation: a small text link below article titles; and a larger graphic button docked at the lower right corner of the browser window. The goal of this short test is to measure the impact of these more prominent links in getting users to contribute useful feedback and edits.

Browsing and filtering feedback

To help editors improve articles based on the best suggestions from our readers, we are developing a special feedback page. The goal of this page is to enable editors to view feedback from readers so they may act on the feedback, when appropriate.  The Feedback Page will include tools to make it easy for editors to feature actionable feedback, as well as flag or hide offensive posts. In coming weeks, we will introduce this new set of tools to readers and editors, and refine them based on their reactions.

Measuring impact on engagement

Our next research will focus on the effects of feedback on editing activity. We will first analyze whether link prominence increases or decreases feedback quality and edit conversions. Second, we will test the feedback form against a direct call to edit Wikipedia articles. Lastly, we will also analyze the revert and survival rate of edits in these different experimental conditions. In the process, we will measure clicks on various buttons of the AFTv5 feedback forms, as well as for edit buttons. These tests will be limited to the same small random sample of articles (0.6% of the English Wikipedia) and will only last a few weeks.

Get involved

If you would like to contribute to this project, we’d love to have you on board. We are developing this new tool in collaboration with a workgroup of Wikipedia editors, with whom we meet regularly over IRC and other channels. We are looking for more volunteers to test and report on new features, and help improve this article feedback tool as a community.

Here are some of the ways you can contact us or learn more about AFTv5:

• AFTv5 overview page
• Comment on our talk page
• Sign up to evaluate feedback
• Email us at aft@wikimedia.org

We’d like to give special thanks and recognition to some of the community members who have helped us develop this new tool. Workgroup participants include: Bensin, Dcoetzee, Dougweller, GorillaWarfare, RJHall, Sonia, Tom Morris and Utar. We are grateful to you all for your insights and commitment to this project!

We look forward to working with you all to extend the article feedback tool in coming months. Together, we hope to create a useful feedback system on Wikipedia, to help editors improve articles based on reader suggestions – and to invite readers to become editors over time.

On behalf of the Article Feedback Tool Team,

Fabrice Florin, Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Howie Fung, Director of Product Development
Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor)
Oliver Keyes, Community Liaison, Product Development (Contractor)
Dario Taraborelli, Sr Research Analyst, Strategy

Earlier this year, a first version of the Article Feedback Tool (“Rate this Page”) was rolled out to all articles on the English Wikipedia.  The idea behind this feature was two-fold: to provide a measurement of article quality from readers and to provide a potential on-ramp for these readers so that some may become editors.  We found through our analysis that while direct quality assessment is a very tricky matter (a rating of the Justin Bieber page says as much about the rater’s opinion of Bieber as it does about the quality of the article), the use of ratings as a form of low-barrier participation showed promise.  We also received plenty of feedback from the community around how we might improve this feature.

In October, we began development of the next generation of the tool (AFTv5).  Instead of focusing on explicit quality ratings, we shifted the direction of the tool towards finding new ways for readers to help build the encyclopedia.  So rather than primarily asking them to rate the quality of the article, we are asking readers for their input on how to improve the article. We are still testing different lightweight quality metrics, as well.

We are approaching this development in several phases.  The first phase, which went live today, is a test deployment of three new versions of the tool on approximately 10,000 randomly selected articles on the English Wikipedia and on a small number of manually selected articles. For examples, see Android, Wikipedia, and Global Warming.

Here is one of the three versions that are being tested:

This new version of the tool asks the reader whether they found what they were looking for, and if not, prompts them to explain what is missing.  The intent of this version is to provide editors with some idea of feedback on what readers are actually hoping to see when they read a Wikipedia article.  This information may then be used by the editing community when deciding how to improve the page.  The other two versions also ask for reader comments, but with different questions: the second version lets you make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question; the third version lets you review the article. These new forms were developed by OmniTI, a web development firm, and were based on designs created by the Wikimedia Foundation in collaboration with the Wikipedia community. To learn more, visit the AFTv5 project page.

We are inviting members of the editing community to evaluate the quality of the comments coming in from each of these three versions of the feedback form.  The goal is to determine which of these versions is most effective at providing high quality feedback that can help improve articles.  Aaron Halfaker, a Wikipedia researcher from the University of Minnesota and a WMF contractor, has developed an evaluation tool that will enable Wikipedia editors to systematically evaluate the quality of the feedback provided. Assuming that these new versions provide constructive feedback, the next step would be to expose these comments in Wikipedia.  To that end, a “Feedback Page” is now under development with community input, and will provide a space where editors can view article feedback, moderate the comment stream, and promote the best contributions to the article talk page.

Oliver Keyes, a member of the English Wikipedia community, is under contract with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Liaison to involve editors in this project.  In this role, Oliver is moderating discussions, collecting feedback about the tool, and working with the development team to incorporate this feedback.  Many of the ideas that are in the current test versions came from discussions with these editors.  We will continue to work with the community very closely in the next stages of product design and development. If you’re part of the editing community and want to get involved, please email Oliver (okeyes at wikimedia dot org). Our immediate need is to help evaluate the comment streams generated by each option.  Very soon, we will also need editors to help us design the Feedback Page, which will be used to review and potentially act on the feedback comments.

We hope this new feature can help engage a broader community of readers to provide constructive feedback on articles, share what they know and contribute regularly on Wikipedia.

Howie Fung, Senior Product Manager

Fabrice Florin, Product Consultant

This is probably the first time Arabic Wikipedians, who are scattered across the Middle East, get a change to meet in person. It was our pleasure meeting each of Ciphers, Abanima, Ahmad, OsamaK as well as Rami Tarawneh, who is among the early founders of Arabic Wikipedia. On the first day and after brief introductions, Rami told us the story behind how Arabic Wikipedia started; what were the challenges that faced the community during the early days and how Arabic Wikipedia policies changed along with time. For the rest of the day and for the following couple of days, the discussions revolved mainly around three main topics: Machine translations, education and outreach. We listened to the lessons learned from a machine translation project that was carried out in 2009 on Arabic Wikipedia and we had a presentation by Bala Jeyaraman, who gave us a detailed and impressive talk about a similar project that was finished last March on Tamil Wikipedia. Naren Datha, from WikiBhasha team, also gave a small talk about how their tool works. In addition to machine translation, Frank Schulenburg gave a brief introduction to how our global education program operates in different countries, then we listened to a success story by the coordinator of WikiArabi project. Our last day included discussions around possible online and offline outreach strategies that can leverage both the content and the number of contributors of Arabic Wikipedia, we were also introduced to Arabic Web Day initiative.

The discussion helped the community communicate on a personal level, and present its culture and aesthetic to enthusiasts who are considering using Wikipedia as a platform for enhancing Arabic web content, and to the QCRI team who are currently helping our Global Development department render a number of solid projects on the ground across MENA.

The global development team will leave the 80°F/27°C Doha in a couple of hours, heading to Amman for a one day visit to The University of Jordan, before we go to Egypt, for meetings with professors at Cairo University, and with the Arabic Wikipedia Community.

A year ago, Arabic Wikipedia was nearly 120k articles, with a community striving to start an action on the ground in different places, by applying a chapter model in different locations across the region. Our MENA catalyst project is now bringing new possibilities, growing a more solid vision, with feasible funding and a work-in-progress action plan.

We shall keep you posted with our next steps and research findings, meanwhile, wish us luck in our MENA endeavors, a region which is hot, in many different ways.

Salaam!
Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

As many of you know, the Wikimedia movement strategy that was finalized in February 2011 re-emphasized the importance of Arabic Wikipedia to the achievement of the Wikimedia vision. The Wikimedia Foundation team has started in the past month to work on plans to support the growth of Arabic Wikipedia in the coming months and years. We want to learn about the region and the Arabic Wikipedia community and we would like to start some initiatives in the region to create new enthusiasm for Wikipedia and close the gap between Arabic Wikipedia and larger projects, such as English Wikipedia. There are close to 400 million people who speak Arabic and we want them included in our vision.

Our plans came in line with a common interest of Qatar Foundation’s computing research institute – QCRI team which was researching possible ways of supporting Arabic Wikipedia. They feel that the Arabic language community needs to have a great Wikipedia and they want to help us to build on your work in the community to attract new editors and try new approaches. We asked them to host a small working session with us, a group of leading contributors to Arabic Wikipedia and some outside advisors as a way for us to start making plans for the near future. We will be holding this working session in Doha on 20 and 21 October. While we will only have a few people there in person, we would like to hear your thoughts on the opportunities and challenges and have set up a space on Arabic Wikipedia; for discussion before, during and after the session. We will also capture notes to share the results of the discussion. We are excited to create the first of hopefully many opportunities for Arabic Wikipedians to get together in person.

Beyond the working session, the Wikimedia Foundation is in discussions with the Qatar Foundation the joint collaboration of a pilot and then a broader launch of our Global Education Program in the region. This initiative which has been launched in the United States and India presents a real opportunity to bring new forms of contributions to Arabic Wikipedia. We plan to support outreach activities you might want to plan locally as well as regional initiatives. We are taking another look at translation work reflecting on the experiences with Google’s translation work and experiences in other parts of the world. Finally, we want to hear from the community and like-minded groups about new and innovative ways to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia community.

This is bound to be a long journey together and we look forward to getting to know the Arabic Wikipedia community, to learning from you and to partnering with you to achieve our shared vision. We will have an IRC hour on Thursday, October 13 2011 at 20:00 UTC in #wikipedia-ar, to listen to the community suggestions and respond to any inquiries around the initiative. The conversation will be in English and Moushira will assist with translation if required.

Barry & Moushira

Barry is the Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco, USA. Moushira is a consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation based in Alexandria, Egypt.

This post links to the landing page for the final report on Meta, which is available on meta wiki itself and as a downloadable PDF. In addition, raw, anonymized data in a CSV format is available on data dumps for download and further analysis.  We have also provided a codebook and documentation to aid in analysis.

The report covers the following research areas:

• Editing Activities: What drives editors to edit Wikipedia? What are the different types of editing activities? How do the editors assess the different tools available to them?
• Demographics: What is the educational background of editors? What is the gender and age distribution of editors? What are the differences and similarities among different groups of editors?
• Women editors: What are the experiences of women editors? Do women editors have different experiences compared to male editors? Can women editors be segmented into different groups?
• Editing community: What kinds of interactions do editors have with each other? What kinds of interactions are conducive to editing and what are deterrents to future editing?
• Location and Language:Where do editors live? How many language Wikipedias do editors edit? Which language Wikipedia gets the maximum attention?
• Technology and Networking: What kinds of technological devices do editors own or have access to? What devices do they use for editing and reading Wikipedia? Do editors use social media tools? How?
• Foundation, chapters and board: What is the assessment of the foundation, its chapters, and the Wikimedia movement? Do editors participate in board elections?

Such insights take time to develop, but we can assure you the results are worth the wait.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the tenth in series of blog posts where we previously shared insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey.)

While women editors are more likely to make 1 to 50 lifetime edits compared to men, male editors are more likely to make more than 10,000 + edits compared to women. One-third of women editors reported that they had made between 1 to 50 edits, compared to 18% of male editors. On the other hand, a higher percentage of men (23%) reported having made upwards of 10,000 edits, versus 18% of female editors. There are no statistically significant differences among men and women editors within other groups based on total edit count.

A full 91% of editors who participated in the April 2011, Editor Survey are male, while 8.5% are female. The remainder (0.5%) identified as transsexual or transgender.

Much has been written about Wikipedia’s highly skewed gender distribution, including this recent NYT story.  WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote this insightful blog post on the topic as well.

The Foundation is aiming to increase the number of women participants on Wikipedia from 9,000 (as of spring 2011) to 11,700 by spring 2012. We will accomplish this partly by introducing tools and features that making editing simple for everyone – including a visual editor.  We’ve also seen great success in the participation of women via our Wikipedia in the class room initiatives.  These efforts, which are expanding around the world, tend to bring in a much representative proportion of men and women contributors.

Keep an eye out for future product updates that will enable us to work towards our strategic goals of increasing participation. We have a tall task ahead of us, and we’ll reach it even sooner if we all put our heads together. This is one smart community.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the sixth in series of blog posts where we will share insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey)

The Annual Plan provides an overview of the Foundation’s main work through the fiscal year (July 1 through June 30), most importantly highlighting our efforts on diversifying and expanding the Wikimedia project editor/contributor community, growing our presence in India and Brazil, increasing our reach via mobile devices, and ensuring our financial sustainability.

We have seven big targets for the fiscal year.  Highlighting two:

1. We want to increase Wikipedia page views on mobile devices to two billion by June 2012, up from 726 million in March 2011. This will mean a big emphasis on partnerships with mobile service providers and technological improvements to our mobile Wikipedia gateway. Mobile is crucial for engaging online users, particularly those from the Global South, where mobile devices are already the primary method of accessing the Internet, and for some, the only method available to edit.

2. The declining participation of seasoned Wikipedia editors must be reversed. We’re aiming to increase the number of active editors from just under 90K in March 2011, to 95K by June 2012. Our community has been continuously engaged in this conversation for several years, and the Foundation has made the decline a major focus of our work over the coming years. Proactive steps must be taken to reinforce Wikipedia’s core community of strong editors, and we must continue our research into the causes and solutions for the decline.

Our other major targets in this fiscal year:

3. Increase the number of Global South active editors from approximately 15.7K in March 2011, to 19K in June 2012.
4. Increase the number of female editors from approximately 9K in spring 2011 to 11.7K in spring 2012.
5. Develop the Visual Editor. First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012.
6. Develop a sandbox for research, prototyping, and tools development, with initial hardware build-out and first project access by December 2011, and full access for all qualifying individuals/projects by June 2012.
7. Increase read uptime from 99.8% in 2010-11 to 99.85% in 2011-12.

The full plan includes more details and footnotes related to these goals. We’ve also posted detailed questions and answers on the annual plan hosted on the Foundation wiki.

In addition to the Foundation’s monthly report card meetings, where progress on these goals will be regularly reported, we’ll also be blogging about our efforts throughout the year.  Get involved if you’d like to help.  Join our projects and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge!

Jay Walsh, Communications

WikiViz 2011 is about visualizing the impact of Wikipedia using open data. We want to see the most effective, compelling and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture and open collaboration model. Potential topics include: the imprint of Wikipedia on knowledge sharing and access to information; its impact on literacy and education, journalism and research; on the functioning of scientific and cultural organizations and businesses, as well as the daily life of individuals around the world. In addition, we want to see visualizations of areas of knowledge, geographical regions, organizations and people Wikipedia has not been able to reach or has impacted less than one would have expected. In summary, the main goal of this competition is to improve our understanding of how Wikipedia is affecting the world beyond the scope of its own community.

Awards

The WikiViz 2011 Awarding Ceremony will take place on October 4, at WikiSym 2011 main venue, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley campus (Mountain View, California). The ceremony will open with keynote speaker Jeff Heer (Stanford University), on the impact of emerging visualization techniques to understand open collaboration today.

Three finalist teams (1 winner, 2 runners-up) will be invited to present their work at WikiSym 2011, in Mountain View (California). Travel expenses and registration fees will be covered for one delegate per finalist team. The submissions from these three teams will be showcased at the WikiSym 2011 exhibit, presented during the WikiViz awards ceremony and featured by our Knowledge and Media Partners (Unidad Editorial, Periscopic, Information Aesthetics, Visualizing.org and Flowing Data).

Furthermore, Spanish media group Unidad Editorial will run a voting process in September, among the visitors of El Mundo.es, (the largest digital newspaper in Spanish by readership worldwide), to select the “Public’s choice” visualization among the top 10 submissions received. The winner will be featured in the digital edition of El Mundo.

Jury

The finalists will be selected by a jury composed of world-class experts in data visualization and social computing:

• Moritz Stefaner (Well Formed Data).
• Kim Rees (Periscopic).
• Andrew Vande Moere (KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics).
• Erik Zachte (Wikimedia Foundation)
• Gregorio Convertino (Xerox PARC and WikiSym 2011 Symposium Committee)

How to participate

Please, refer to the WikiViz call for participation to learn more details about terms and conditions to participate, submission instructions, selection rules and evaluation criteria. Only entries based on open data and licensed under a Wikimedia Commons-compatible open license will be considered.

Important dates

• June 29, 2011: Challenge call for submissions.
• August 28, 2011: Submission deadline (extended).
• September 12, 2011: Winner and finalist submissions announced.
• October 4, 2011: WikiViz awards session, WikiSym 2011 (Mountain View, CA).

Contact

For any questions, comments or interest in supporting or collaborating with this challenge, please contact the co-organizers at: wikiviz2011@easychair.org

• Felipe Ortega (WikiSym)
• Dario Taraborelli (Wikimedia Foundation)

You can also follow us on Twitter: @WikiViz (tag your tweets with #wikiviz11).

More

WikiViz 2011 is the second of two data challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is organizing this summer. If you are interesting in building predictive models of Wikipedia editor activity, check out the Wikipedia participation challenge

Organizers

Media Sponsors

Knowledge Partners

Other news stories have further focused on this particular number, some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise, others highlighting its strengths and resilience. It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture strategy.

In a nutshell, here’s what we know:

• The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow.  In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September.  Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world.
• The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing.  There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day.
• The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then.  Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people.

The numbers quoted in the Wall Street Journal are the result of analysis by Spanish researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega. Dr. Ortega has conducted valuable research on a wide range of aspects of the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.  It is, however, important to understand the meaning of the cited numbers.  Dr. Ortega’s findings are described in his doctoral thesis “Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis.”

Even more importantly, the findings reported by the Wall Street Journal are not a measure of the number of people participating in a given month. Rather, they come from the part of Dr. Ortega’s research that attempts to measure when individual Wikipedia volunteers start editing, and when they stop. Because it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

Dr. Ortega supplements this research with data about the actual participation (number of changes, number of editors) in the different language editions of our projects. His findings regarding actual participation are generally consistent with our own, as well as those of other researchers such as Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.

What do those numbers show?  Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then. (See WikiStats data for all Wikipedia languages combined.) On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period. As a result the overall number of editors on all projects combined has been stable at a high level over recent years. We’re continuing to work with Dr. Ortega to specifically better understand the long-term trend in editor retention, and whether this trend may result in a decrease of the number of editors in the future.

Let’s move on to the bigger picture.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to ensure that every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. Both the health and growth of our volunteer community are key to succeeding in that endeavor. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation works with researchers from around the world to understand what is happening in its projects, supports comprehensive analytics work, and is pursuing long term initiatives to recruit new editors and support the development of its communities:

• Our usability initiative is making it easier to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects by improving the underlying open source technology. Removing barriers is key to recruiting new editors.
• Our outreach initiative is developing a comprehensive set of training and outreach materials that will help us to recruit new volunteer editors.
• Our strategic planning initiative is a unique community-driven process to identify how we can maximize our impact. One of its task forces is specifically studying community health.

Wikimedia chapter organizations around the world are supporting our technology work, our outreach initiatives, and strategic partnerships; their activities are documented in the archive of chapter reports.

The Wikimedia volunteer community is also engaged in important discussions and experiments. A community-initiated project in the English Wikipedia, for example, tried to assess the typical experience of new Wikipedia editors when trying to contribute useful content. This newbie treatment study is directly informing community discussions about community processes. Similar experiments and large strategic discussions are happening in other languages.

These discussions and projects are important. Wikimedia is a unique global volunteer movement to share what we know, to make and keep it available. We need your help and your participation in these initiatives – please follow the above links and get involved.

We want more people to join us, to edit Wikipedia to make it richer and better and more comprehensive. We don’t know what the “perfect” number of Wikipedia volunteers is, but we do know that we want to significantly increase it from where it is today.

In addition to direct volunteer participation, Wikimedia depends on public support. If you share our goal of bringing free knowledge to every person on the planet, please make a donation today.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director
Erik Zachte, Data Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation