Intro

• Personal introduction
• Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and a community

A brief history of the Wikipedian community

• 2001-2004: a small, tight-knit community with few explicit rules
• 2004-2007: massive popularity, many new problems, many new policies
• 2007-2011: post-peak, the rise of algorithmic governance
• 2011-present: the Wikimedia Foundation’s expanded roles

Issues that Wikipedia faces:

• Managing encyclopedic quality at scale when anyone can contribute
• Retaining and socializing newcomers
• Systemic bias and inequalities in participation by underrepresented groups
• Relationship between professional staff and volunteer community

Initiatives:

• Local and/or thematic ‘edit-a-thons’ for newcomers and marginalized groups
• A/B testing new automated rejection messages sent to newcomers
• New interfaces for supporting mentoring and productive socialization
• New spaces for newcomers to learn from veterans and each other
• Making more low-risk ways for readers & newcomers to contribute
• Engaging community members in machine learning classifiers (for spam, etc )

Broader lessons learned and food for thought

• Even the best planned, most well-intentioned initiatives can fail
• Making governance more modular, rather than site-wide changes
• Maintaining healthy relationships between volunteers and professional staff