Wiki

Full Draft of Memo on DropIO

BIRTH & GROWTH OF WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It represented a new development in the collaborative, web-based creation of bodies of knowledge. Initially it was a complement to the expert-written encyclopedia project “Nupedia,” in order to provide an additional source of articles. Wikipedia soon outpaced Nupedia and grew to be arguably the most successful example of collaborative content creation. Today Wikipedia boasts that it contains several million articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide contributed by millions of users.

Wikipedia is arguably the most successful online collaboration but it is not the first. One early predecessor was Interpedia, initiated in 1993, although the project never fully left the planning stages. Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman described the need for a free universal encyclopedia in 1999, although the Free Software Foundation didn’t launch its GNUPedia to compete with Nupedia until January 17, 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia. And Wikipedia itself grew out of Nupedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia. On January 10, 2001, Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki, but reputedly Nupedia’s expert volunteers did not want to participate, so Wikipedia was established as a separate site. Wikipedia’s vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

Growth of Wikipedia

The growth of Wikipedia depended on the contribution of numerous lay users, a departure from the Nupedia tradition of using expert contributors. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified expert contributors and a multi-step peer review process, but despite its interested editors, the process was slow, and only 12 articles were written in the first year. Wikipedia, in contrast, generated over 1,000 articles in its first month of operation and over 20,000 articles in its first year—a rate of 1,500 articles per month. In September, 2001, Wikipedia expanded into multilingual sites, beginning the development of Wikipedias for all major languages.

Wikimedia

Initially, Wikipedia was managed by Bomis, an organization headed by Jimmy Wales. In March 2002, during the dot-com bust, Bomis withdrew funding for Wikipedia. At that time, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. He returned briefly to academia, then joined the Digital Universe Foundation and founded Citizendium, an alternative open encyclopedia that uses real names for contributors to discourage vandalism and expert guidance to ensure accuracy of information.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales created the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization head-quartered in San Francisco, CA. Wikimedia was announced on June 20, 2003. Wikimedia serves as an umbrella body that includes several other types of wiki collaborative information sharing sites:

• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary
• Wikiquote
• Wikibooks (including Wikijunior)
• Wikisource
• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikispecies
• Wikinews
• Wikiversity
• Wikimedia Incubator
• Meta-Wiki

The foundation's by-laws declare a statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Wikimedia is managed by a Board of Trustees. The Foundation’s board also organizes Wikimania every year, a conference for users of the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Beyond this - just a basic outline to be filled in

ACADEMIC STUDIES OF WIKIPEDIA

Academic studies of Wikipedia have mainly used Wikipedia as a tool to analyze other phenomenon. The users on Wikipedia provide a large database of subjects which the researchers use to test their hypotheses or as a social network which can be manipulated and observed. The majority of studies focus on either semantic relatedness or online coordination and conflict resolution techniques.

CHALLENGES & POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

Wikimania presents an opportunity for users and editors of Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) to raise concerns about the future of the project. Following Wikimania 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation created a strategy page that identifies major concerns for the future of Wikimedia and permits users to contribute and comment on proposed solutions. The problems presented below have been highlighted as the most significant and challenging problems facing Wikimedia.

Identity & Growth of the Contributing Community

There are three main concerns relating to the contributing community that sustains Wikipedia:

1. Size of the contributing community – is it sustainable and is it sufficient?
2. Identity of the contributing community – does population bias create content bias?
3. Inequality within contributing community – does Wikipedia really represent contributions of the many, or is it moving towards an elite system?

These three problems are inter-related, but they are separated below for the moment for clarity.

Size of the Contributing Community

• Is the size of the community shrinking?
• What size is necessary to maintain Wikipedia? (arguably fewer needed now that main production done; more focus on editing and refining can be done by fewer users)

• What motivates Wikipedia contributors?
  • boredom, fame, credit, skill, socialization, fun, ideology
  • does motive affect content? E.g. if contribute for fame, credit or socialization, then anonymous contribution may not be the optimal strategy; if contribute for ideology, then identity of the community becomes important to prevent content bias
  • Generally volunteers considered to be motivated by six emotions – boredom, credit (career), skill, socialization, ideology, and protective.
  • In open source collaborations, ideology and fun are considered quite important
  • In one study, the top top motivations were found to be Fun and Ideology, whereas Social, Career, and Protective were not found to be strong motivations for contribution.
• Interestingly, level of contribution did not necessarily coincide with degree of motivation (“average level of contribution was 8.27 hours per week—a total that varied across Wikipedians’ demographics and motivation levels”).

• Study by Palo Alto Research Centre found that the number of new articles added per month flatlined at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by a third.
  • This does not mean necessarily that the number of users has fallen. Growth in the number of active Wikipedia editors a month reached a peak of 820,532 in March 2007 and has since fluctuated between 650,000 and 810,000.
• The number of users is also related to inequity between groups of contributors (see below).
  • "Because the project is much more filled out and more complete, it's increasingly harder for new users to be able to add something without some level of expertise," said Wikimedia Australia vice-president Liam Wyatt.

Identity of the Contributing Community

• How does the identity of users—e.g. gender, age, experience, politics—bias content?
• How can such bias be corrected?
• Also – if want to help correct the size of the community issue
• What is the identity:
  • According to one study by Oded Nov, using the English Wikipedia Alphabetical List of Wikipedians (2,847 people) as a sample, 92.7% contributors are males. Another study says 87% are male.
  • Mean age was 30.9 and on average they have been contributing content to Wikipedia 2.3 years.
• Interestingly, women appear to contribute more than men (though sample size too small to be significant).

Inequality Within Contributing Community

• Wikipedia was launched in 2001 with the pledge of being a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but since then the more established editors, with their own world views and biases, have rapidly grown to dominate the site. There is some comment that these editors are resistant to new content and ideas.
• Study found that these elite users were pushing out new contributors, with 25 per cent of occasional wiki editors' changes erased or reverted by other editors. This is up from 10 per cent in 2003.

Potential Solutions

Solutions that have been presented in proposals on the Wikipedia strategy page include:

• Copyright protection proposal – as means to increase contribution by protecting work produced by wikipedians; but this presumes that credit is a motive for wikipedians, which studies do not necessarily support; how then to increase support?
• Strengthen the community by:
  • Expanding reach within large well-connected populations
  • Expanding reach within midsize and under-connected populations
• Convert more readers into participants: identify and fix the barriers that prevent more readers from participating
• Improve diversity: improve participation in under-represented groups
• Simplify and reduce policy proliferation to prevent old policies from stifling growth in newer projects

Wikimedia's projects combined have a global audience of more than 300 million visitors every month, according to comScore. About one among one thousand people makes at least a small number of edits and other contributions every month. In 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation formulated a "big hairy audacious goal": "To increase Wikimedia's educational reach to one-third of the planet's population by 2020, and to motivate every 10th reader to become an active participant."

Quality Control - Perceived and Actual

It is important to distinguish between concerns about the actual quality of Wikipedia articles and concerns about the perceived quality of the articles. The one should be approached as a contributor and technical problem and the other should be addressed as a publicity problem. They will be dealt with separately below. Also, the concept of quality is intentionally broad and includes everything from accuracy of information to degree of citation provided to quality of images and prose.

Actual Quality of Wikipedia

Also regardless of whether Wikipedia is currently accurate or not, there is always room for improvement. The actual quality of articles on Wikipedia includes several concerns:

1. Accuracy of information
   1. Information citation loops
   2. Vandalism
2. Anonymity of authors
   1. Credential verification – Essjay controversy
   2. Potential solutions (reputation ranking)
3. Content coverage – biased towards popular news events
4. Political bias / balance of articles
5. Quality of prose & presentation

These will each be addressed below with potential solutions for each section.

Sustainability of Wikimedia Model

Technologically

• Technologically: how have a platform that both supports the numerous users who regularly access Wikimedia and still serves the less tech savvy contributor base
• lack of features can in itself be a feature

Organizationally

• Organizationally: financial sustainability and organizational models raise concerns about generating a renewable and reliable source of revenue and how to adapt to different roles in the future

• If the number of administrators, retaining a certain degree of institutional authority, continues to grow over time, will a new complexity make it necessary to increase the number of hierarchical layers in the structure and discourage participation? This issue will need to be resolved at some point in the future.

Emerging Strategic Priorities in this area include:

• • Optimize Wikimedia’s operations
  • Identify roles volunteers are best suited to perform and what are the most effective uses of paid staff
  • Create alliances and partnerships with other institutions and organizations to advance the mission: also, what are the necessary preconditions to such alliances? How support similar projects?