Wikipedia and the End of Open Collaboration?
- This article was originally published by Wikipedia@20. The authors have generously allowed The Signpost, and others, to publish it under a CC-BY license.—S
That which enabled Wikipedia to grow and become an invaluable free and open information resource have changed—both within Wikipedia itself and in the wider world. Hill and Shaw ask if there is room for optimism about the future of Wikipedia or open collaboration more broadly.
— The editors of Wikipedia@20
Was Wikipedia a fluke? Just luck? Some freak accident of timing, technology, and vision? Since the project began in January, 2001, no attempt at collaborative knowledge production has produced as large, widely-used, or valuable a public resource. Given its exceptional character, any attempt to explain Wikipedia’s growth and impact—much less draw general insights on how to replicate it—can seem like a fool’s errand.
Wikipedia’s incredible success masks a more complex story. In fact, not even Wikipedia has been able to maintain a stable community of volunteers over the past two decades. Figure 1 shows the number of “active” contributors to eight of the largest language versions of Wikipedia over time. The top left panel shows English Wikipedia’s explosive contributor growth through March 2007 and its transition into a long, slow period of decline. The other panels show similar patterns across the seven largest Wikipedia language versions measured by contributor base. Readership and other uses of Wikipedia have increased steadily over the period shown. As scholars of open collaboration and as concerned contributors to, and users of, Wikipedia, these dynamics have been the center of much of our research over the last decade.
Although the death of Wikipedia has been foretold many times, the dynamics playing out in the graphs above imply that long-term decline in contributors may be undermining the project from within in important ways. As the contributor bases of most of the large Wikipedia language versions shrink over time, fewer editors means reduced capacity to cover new topics and to maintain high quality content. What future do these projects have? What explains the patterns illustrated in Figure 1? What should Wikipedia and proponents of open collaborations and knowledge do?
- ^ The figure is reproduced from Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill, “Revisiting ‘The Rise and Decline’ in a Population of Peer Production Projects,” in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18) (New York, NY: ACM, 2018), 355:1–355:7, https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173929.