Sometimes Wikipedia editors come together as a group to have off-wiki relationships with each other. To present, so far as I know, these groups have begun when people on-wiki have come to realize they live geographically close to each other and meet in person to chat about Wikipedia for social reasons. A wiki-club is established with fan base spirit, and from that base, all sorts of other people might join for any reason. Early joiners will be people seeking collaborators for what they do on Wikipedia and people who are interested in free culture projects regardless of their engagement in Wikipedia. This is the point at which some professional people begin to bring insights from their field of expertise into the club, like for example, some club members will have any professional background. The club can develop its own reputation at this point, and from here, begin to attract the attention of non-Wikipedia contributors who seek some kind of consulting with the Wikipedia community. Non-contributors who begin to enter at this point will include representatives of any sort of knowledge-based institution which is seeking to leverage Wikipedia as a communication platform.
When I moved to New York from Seattle in 2012, I moved from my wiki club in Seattle to the one in New York. Both clubs were small fan clubs but the New York one was better established with more members and included some individuals with Wikipedia forays into institutional collaboration. Richard, especially, was the first person to secure what would later be called a “Wikipedian in Residence” role having partnered with MoMA in 2009 and other places regularly thereafter. He was an early promoter of the “editathon”, which is an in-person group meetup in which people in the same place all edit Wikipedia articles collaboratively around a theme with shared intent. Richard has had singular influence on establishing the culture of the Wikipedia community, and because of him, the NYC wiki group both developed its culture quickly and also established the model that dozens of other wiki groups would follow.
In 2012 the Seattle group met about monthly in a small meeting and the NYC group met perhaps 20 times a year. I took this job at Consumer Reports, and in that role, I sought the counsel of members of WM NYC in everything I did and WM NYC gained me as a professional anchor in their operations. It was helpful for me to get feedback for what I did to place Consumer Reports’ content into Wikipedia, and since I was the first full time staff person anywhere employed to engage in Wikipedia, my role because an example for what the community could pitch to other potential partners. “Share your expertise on Wikipedia. For example, Consumer Reports does that…” It was a shocking innovation in 2012 for me to take this role and it still is surprises many institutional representatives today to think that Wikipedia is worth more than active derision. It still is challenging for me to put myself out publicly knowing that I will simultaneously attract strong praise and condemnation, continually. This mixed reaction comes varyingly from different individuals who seem to be professional peers with each other in any given sector, and who are incredulous to learn that there are differing perspectives in their field toward Wikipedia.
There are different ways to measure the development of the Wikipedia community base in New York. Some of the ways that we have imagined tracking the development are number of meetups, number of meetup participants, Wikipedia engagement metrics of participants, number of hours spent engaging in Wikipedia by participants, qualitative measurements of satisfaction as reported by surveys of participants, number of commitments to volunteer for administrative roles in local in person community organizing, counts of institutional partners, measures of depth of engagement of institutional partners, amount of finances brought in by the community organization, measurements of the value of in-kind donations to the community base, counts of staff hours hired by any local organization for the purpose of engaging in projects which advance the chapter’s goals, media mentions or profiling, ratio of positive responses to indifferent responses in outreach, counts of solicitation offers, and consideration of the prestige of institutions which treat our community base as their peer. By whatever measurement anyone has considered, the productive output of WM NYC has exploded since 2012. Zeitgeist like this is party because the people who make it happen, and partly because if no one is making things happen then someone would recognize the gap and make things happen. Still, I think that because of the input of WM NYC participants who had some foresight of popular interest, the accomplishments of WM NYC are being had sooner, more confidently, with more impact, and with more frequency than they could have happened were it not for the leadership of the individuals currently on the board of the chapter plus some key advisors. Right now, there are about 30 people in New York City who routinely organize Wikipedia events and are evangelizing the wiki concept. From that base all sorts of things are happening.
I have been expressing desire for better wiki software for measuring community engagement for a long time. It is not my place to develop software for this, although when others have done useful things, I have tried to give comment and document their contribution to build support for the idea of more metrics tool development. There is no good data collection system in the wiki community currently, and all of the measurement strategies I mentioned above have big problems in that data collection precision varies widely among different groups and even year to year in the same group. One measurement which seems simple enough is a count of how many meetings any given wiki group supports over a given period, like “meetups per year”. Even this is challenging, because at present, there is no custom in the Wikipedia community to make a record of meetings even happening. Many better established groups do usually, but still not always, and even still meetups are not recorded in any consistent way which allows them to be automatically counted.
I was thinking about these things as the chapter confirmed a 6-month report for a grant it is using. The infrastructure and precedent being established will lead to so much more in the future, and someday there will be enough culture and software to enable all sorts of contributions. What if someday it was easy for people to share information on Wikipedia without learning complicated coding? What if someday groups of people could collect a set of information and media, and it was not challenging to look at the texts and images and videos themselves? What if when groups collaborating, the software automatically noted what each individual in the group had shared, and what the group collectively contributed, so that the team could appreciate whatever progress they made and impact that they had? Right now all of these things are challenging and so much is still being sorted. I could not have guessed in 2012 that by 2016, there would be so much interest in in-person Wikipedia events. I could not have guessed that there would be so much resistance to Wikipedia in 2012, but so much more support just a few years later.