Sometimes people ask about particular Wikipedia community projects and want to use the precedent as a model for their own project. For example, in New York there are various projects including Wikipedia editing events at libraries, museums, nonprofit organizations, and other community centers. A project typically includes a group of community volunteers working with experts from an organization who together organize an in-person public event and online events for crowdsourced participation in a themed project with a particular goal. Examples include any of the following:
- Medical students at a local medical school meet to edit Wikipedia articles related to health. Sometimes they meet with their student peers, but also sometimes they join public events and interact with other Wikipedia contributors. Sometimes health experts are present to advise about sharing health content.
- In Art+Feminism the combined interest of art museums, art professionals outside of museums, and an interested public converges to present a complicated set of programs including compiling biographies of artists; curating collections of art by artist, institution holdings, or other classification; and developing social movements as diverse as increased access to arts to promotion of culture from underrepresented groups to general advocacy for rights of all kinds.
- In AfroCROWD the stated objective is to encourage people of African descent to participate in free culture projects, but actually, the result has been dozens of in-person and online meetings and hundreds of participants creating any kind of informative digital content covered by Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Although the project continues to invest its time in outreach to a minority population, and does recruit people from its target demographic, those people create content of every sort and are joined by many participants from every demographic.
Suppose that anyone wished to replicate any of these projects at their own institution either in a nearly identical way or in a way with slight variation. These projects might inspire any medical school to attempt to establish its own Wikipedia medical club, or someone to try an event like Art+LGBT, or a group like AfroCROWD but serving another cultural background to do their own event. Could these projects be replicated? Besides what is apparent in them, what more do they need to be successful? I will share some of my own observations of factors which have contributed to the success of these and other projects.
The examples cited above had dedicated organizers with relevant program management experience or aptitude, and that they invested many volunteer hours in making their programs work. In establishing their programs they took great risk in uncertain situations. The most pressing and stressful recurring challenge is recruiting enough participants when inexperienced event coordinators will not be able to predict how many people will respond to a given event advertisement strategy, but to even get to that point an organization team has to be able to promise a viable event. At the time these projects began, the expected outcome in all of these cases might have been failure to progress and abandonment of the attempt before the project matured, because many projects in the Wikipedia and free culture space are initiated, developed, then left when they begin to demand more resources than anyone has to give. Each of these projects needed their own investments to become established. Because these are Wikimedia projects, the initial investment was volunteer time, and as of now, they still all operate fueled by volunteer time, but in the longer term perhaps investments in software, shared community administration, or even funding support can lessen some of the burden on volunteer management for programs like these. I think the Wikimedia community wishes to keep community programming a volunteer affair, but also, there is demand for more programs and lowered barriers to starting and sustaining programs, and somehow using money to lessen volunteer burden is an option that is repeatedly considered even if right now I am not aware of any Wikipedia outreach project depending mostly on funding to sustain itself. When anyone sees success in a Wikipedia project, they should imagine that the success is a consequence of talented, passionate people contributing their free time to make it work.
Assuming that talented, passionate people are organizing a given project, then will it be successful? I am not sure. All of these programs have a base in New York City. While none of these programs depend on community infrastructure in NYC, I think that community infrastructure is definitely an inspiration for programs. Consider these characteristics of the Wikimedia community in New York City:
- There is a Wikimedia chapter organization called Wikimedia New York City which exists to provide support to anyone doing any Wikimedia-related project in the area. The organization is registered as a nonprofit organization and can provide institutional assistance when needed, even though it mostly has no staff (perhaps it can get sponsorship to hire a low-pay worker for 5 hours/week, but to date has not) and mostly is a volunteer organization.
- In 2014 there were about 30 public wiki events in NYC and in 2015 there were 60. Probably for the foreseeable future there will be about 50 events a year supported by the chapter.
- It can be expected that 1500 people will attend in-person Wikipedia events in NYC in a given year.
- It can be expected that not fewer than 200 people will attend more than one in-person Wikipedia events in NYC in a given year.
- Most major institutions in NYC have staff who have attended a Wikipedia event, including all the museums, universities, library systems, media houses, cultural institutions, foundations, companies of all sorts, and government offices. People who would have no interest in media may not realize this, but anyone whose business it is to have broad general knowledge of media trends has some awareness of Wikipedia editors meeting locally. This is not to say that all of these organizations engage with Wikimedia projects, but any organization that is in a field which would have conversations about Wikipedia would likely be able to identify someone close to them who has been to a Wikipedia event.
- If a Wikipedia event is organized and advertised, then predictably, a mix of past meetup attendees and new attendees will show up to the event.
- At least 50 individuals in NYC have been lead organizers for a Wikipedia event, and are competent to organize their own Wikipedia event whenever they want without collaborating with anyone else.
- The events were hosted in a community where it could be expected that attendees at a Wikipedia event would have the cultural and educational background to be able to come to a Wikimedia event with no prior training and in about 15 minutes use the available support to learn everything they need to know to get started.
- New York City has enough infrastructure wealth to provide all the material support needed for Wikipedia events to work including excellent public transportation, community centers with enough space, fast dependable Internet at every venue.
- New York City has a culture which encourages everyone to have all sorts of meetups. Suppose that a volunteer were to go to any community center and say, “I want to host a meetup in your space, and I need you to contribute some of your own resources to make this happen.” It is not certain that the organization would partner in the event, but it is certain that the organization will seriously consider the request whether it is for Wikipedia or even any unknown community or technological project.
Even in the context of New York City’s active Wikimedia community, outreach projects are highly dependent on being connected to other projects. Art projects, for example, get more credibility for being connected to every other sort of outreach project because funding at art institutions is scarce and they need their wiki partners to show that a diverse community or individuals and organizations already are making commitments to develop Wikipedia content. In science and medicine, funding is less limited, but reputations are more fragile. In that case, their concern in looking at infrastructure is being a little more conservative than other outreach efforts, so they like seeing the amount of risk that art organizations will take so that they can make their judgement to scale back from that.
If I had to point to one thing that makes wiki outreach in New York successful, I would say it is diversity of stakeholders. In Wikimedia projects, science, art, minority interests, mainstream interests, research, publishing, professions, and every other field covered by Wikipedia converge. In no case is it possible to isolate any interest, and say that any one community established itself without support without the other interests.