Page:Bringing Wikimedians into the Conversation at Libraries.pdf/4

 If the power rests with the community, who is that volunteer community? Every month, 75-80,000 individual Wikimedia accounts contribute 5+ edits to one of nearly 280 language Wikipedias or other Wikimedia projects, also available in a number of other languages. English Wikipedia, the most voluminous of these projects, includes about 30,000 of these contributors each month. That seems like a quite large number, but in practice five contributions to Wikipedia is actually a rather casual participation in the project: most likely these are contributions to content pages, and those contributors have very little participation in the actual community processes that govern the projects.

To find the folks most invested in the broad maintenance of the projects, we need to look at different numbers: folks who contribute 100+ edits per month, which includes about 14,000 people per month across the Wikimedia projects. On English Wikipedia, still the biggest highly active community, this includes about 3,500 individuals during any given month. For a top 10 website, this is actually a rather small community with relationships and community dynamics that have evolved over the 16 years of Wikipedia’s existence. This long history means that this relatively small community has its own practices, cultural expectations and social problems of similar complexity to those that emerge whenever you ask groups of human beings to contribute time to an ideological effort. Moreover, multiple studies have found the community to be not very diverse when examining specific cross-sections, including less than 20% of contributors identifying as female -- so lack of diversity complicates these broader social issues. ——————————