Dr Toby Hudson is a lecturer at the University of Sydney and has been a Wikipedian for almost a decade. In our interview with him, he talks about how he first started and why he contributes to Wikipedia.
Professor Kerry Raymond is a former academic at the Queensland University of Technology and is now the Vice-President of Wikimedia Australia. She mainly writes Wikipedia articles on Queensland history and feminist topics. The following is an excerpt from her interview with The Wikiverse.
On stereotypes of Wikipedians
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, published under CC licence
The characterizations of Wikipedians in general is largely anecdotal. There has been studies done of editors and unfortunately there haven’t really been studies done trying to tease out the nature of their individual personalities.
On Australian Wikipedians
… I would say that Australian Wikipedians in my experience broadly conform to the range of behaviors you see in Wikipedians more generally. Obviously Australian Wikipedians don’t only edit Australian content articles and similarly, people from overseas edit Australian content articles so, there is a range of people from all countries who might be active in writing one article. I personally wouldn’t say that Australians weren’t especially different. I think you see some well behaved, co- operative people in internationally as well as locally and you see a few who are more difficult to deal with.
On why Wikipedians become Wikipedians
There was a survey done a few years ago that talked about the motivations of people which, I have in front of me because I thought you might ask this of me. And these are the responses that got over 50% of people nominating this, they could tick more than one box.
They started Wikipedia because:
1. They liked the idea of volunteering to share knowledge
2. They saw an error and wanted to fix it
3. Knew a lot about the subject that was poorly covered in Wikipedia.
Now that’s why people start. On the question on why they continued and again just looking at things more than 50% of people ticked:
1. They still liked the idea of volunteering to share knowledge and believed that knowledge should be freely available
2. They liked to contribute on subject matters on which they have expertise
3. They think it’s fun
4. They like Wikipedia’s philosophy of openness and transparency
5. They just keep finding mistakes that need fixing and they keep finding articles that are incomplete or are biased that needs to be reworked.
So those are the reasons they do it. So its a mixture of obviously [Wikipedia’s] values that align with personal values and perfectionism, that “I’ve got it make it right!”
On how to become a Wikipedian
You just sit down in front of web browser and click that edit button and you are a Wikipedian editor too. Just to give you some statistics – again I thought you might want these – in July this year, we had 77 000 active editors on Wikipedia, that means they have made more than five edits in that month. And we had 14 000 new editors, by which we mean people who made their tenth edit in that month. Those are the standard metrics that we track. So, that gives you the example that 14 000 people who probably without anybody helping them just went in started adding to Wikipedia. And about 77 000 who were relatively active throughout the month. The number of registered accounts of course are in the hundreds of thousands. There are obviously a lot of inactive people – people who make the occasional contribution, so its hard to count them, but it is a large group of people and as long as you play by the rules – which are complicated and fluid simultaneous, anyone can really do it.
On the demographics of Wikipedians
People who do it are on average are 31 years old, however, older editors generally make more contributions than younger editors. We know they are mostly men, this was well known anecdotally, surveys found it to be about 9% are women. Now other surveys have come up with 12% but no matter which way you slice and dice it women are a very small percentage of Wikipedia.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Foundation, published under CC licence
On the effect of these demographics on Wikipedia content
Someone did a study a while back where they looked at movie ratings, whether they could tell the people who were rating them were men or women. And what they did was they looked at the set of movies that were most popular with men and the set of movies that were most popular with women and then they went and looked at Wikipedia articles of those movies. And on average the articles of interest of movies that were of interest to men were longer than the articles on movies that were of interest of women suggesting that the skew of the demographics of editors affects content.
On why there are more male Wikipedians than female Wikipedians
Many people would like to know the answer to that question. It is a little bit hard to unpack because unfortunately the people you need to survey are the people you often can’t reach – the women who don’t edit Wikipedia. It’s quite hard to reach them and survey them. My own perception is that simply because women have less leisure time as they tend to still carry a disproportionate share of household duty even in Western countries. And of course Wikipedia is edited by people over the world, in countries where women have less education, less leisure time as society confines them to a certain kind of role where they might not feel like they have the knowledge and it might also have been from countries where they have less access to technology. So you can’t look at every country equally but nonetheless, I think women having less time is a factor. Also, Wikipedia can be an abrasive environment. Now you touched on that when you talked about people being less social, people on Wikipedia can be very abrupt in their dealings with other people and I think that could well be discouraging to women who are a bit more concerned with people’s feelings as well as their own feelings, so they perhaps don’t like being dealt in the way that sometimes people have been on Wikipedia. You can get a bit slapped down at times.
The Wikiverse 