At WikiConference North America 2018 I chatted with Jackie Koerner / user:JackieKoerner about wiki professionalism in research and university collaborations. We both want for universities around the world to routinely and continuously collaborate with Wikipedia to do research to everyone’s mutual benefit. Wikipedia offers the benefits of a popular media channel, and universities have expertise and knowledge but lack the capacity to do communication as inexpensively and effectively as Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is also a resource for research with rapidly developing quality of content and increasingly powerful software capable of replacing many services which previously only university libraries could provide. For many reasons the goals of universities and Wikipedia align.
Jackie has a particular interest in qualitative research. We agreed that too often, someone does quantitative research on Wikipedia and presents results which fail to have an impact because the data requires interpretation by someone who both has Wikipedia expertise and research training. The research path should be qualitative guidance around the research question and scope, quantitative research to analyze the data, qualitative interpretation of that data analysis, then a Wikipedia community organizer bringing those results into the Wikipedia community for discussion and to turn the research into practice recommendations or policy changes. There are hardly any examples of this research cycle being practiced. The Wikimedia Foundation tries to do this sometimes, but probably they are weakest on the community discussion side because the wiki community and Wikimedia Foundation have lots of challenges with mutual trust and respect.
One might expect that the United States would be a stronghold of Wikimedia community organization. There are many highly active Wikimedia contributors in the United States, many US-based organizations either having or experimenting with partnerships, and the United States is in general a base of global influence. The Wikimedia community has had a different development path than Wikimedia communities in other countries. In particular, various European countries are the most stable in terms of independence, productivity, and community engagement in strategic planning. There are a few reasons why wiki in the United States has not actualized, with most of those reasons relating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation headquarters is in the United States, and they have a sphere of influence here because so many of their staff and relationships are here. This might seem like a benefit, but since there is an organization divide between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community, the presence of the Wikimedia Foundation has suppressed community development in the US more than it has supported it. To start, when the Wikimedia community wants to organize anything in the United States, not only does the Wikimedia Foundation not participate in that, but also the Wikimedia Foundation makes an overcompensating show of not favoring the United States over other places.
If it were possible for the WMF to simply treat US community organization like any other country, then that would be fine. Some hindrances of the WMF on the community is that the WMF has a history of preferentially hiring people from the US, so whenever anyone showed leadership, the WMF pulled those individuals out of the community and hired them into roles which necessarily broke their community connections. This means that many regional wiki communities in the United States experienced disruptions of their volunteer user base that other countries never experienced.
Another hindrance is that the WMF talks more with organizations in the United States which confuses potential partner organizations and funders. When the WMF talks with an organization, that establishes the one wiki relationship that the organization is capable of understanding, so a second wiki relationship with the community can never develop. There are no organizations which understand the distinction between the WMF and the wiki community. This is a branding issue, as obviously organizations know the difference between the Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other communities versus their parent organizations, but popular perception cannot think through an analogous distinction for wiki.
A final barrier is that the WMF has a branding strategy to be a region indifferent global organization, when in practice they are more invested in the US than anywhere else. This branding decision means that the WMF as an organization feels intense pressure to downplay its engagement in United States wiki affairs, and consequently they do not talk their US investments, and therefore the community cannot discuss any US-based WMF problems with them. If the wiki community in the US were more organized, then that would make the WMF have to explain that they were not specifically focused on the United States, which would be counterproductive to the global image. In lots of subtle ways this means that WMF staff ask for favors for the wiki community in the US to not mention certain partnerships or projects, which is always an awkward and burdensome conversation to a community which values transparency and open discussion.
What all this means is that research partnerships like the ones Jackie wants are difficult to establish. I am a staff Wikimedian at a university, the first role of this sort in the world, and I want to model change for other universities to follow. I would like for every university in the United States to be able to have some wiki engagement but the community is on its own for this.