As someone who would qualify as a "very active editor" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_ed… I can honestly say that power and activity are definitely not the same thing on Wikipedia. Do I have power? I don't think so. I am not an administrator or other functionary that has power over anyone else. As a person who is principally a content writer, I get my time wasted every day by vandals, by content cited to reliable sources being removed by someone who simply doesn't agree with it but provides no sources to the contrary buts simply writes "Fact!" as an edit summary, that I have to explain to yet another American that we spell things differently in Australia and that is why there is a {{Use Australian English}} template on the top of that article, that "City of Brisbane" cannot be changed as "Brisbane City" as they are NOT the same thing (one is a local government area, the other a suburb, one about 100 times the area of the other) even if they do happen to "look like the same thing" or "think it reads better than way". I wish I did have the power to just "whack a mole" and NOT have to have these *same* conversations over and over and over again with me being WP:CIVIL and them often being not civil (some even track me down in real life and send me abusive e-mail off-wiki, including sexual remarks because I'm a self-identified female contributor). But in Wikipedia, that's OK because ArbCom decided that calling a female contributor "a cunt" isn't that bad. It's Wikipedia not Wokepedia! If I share the contents of that email on-wiki, I'm the one in trouble (their right to privacy), so I just delete them. If I spot a user name whitewashing a politican's article that just happens to be very similar indeed to the real life name of their media advisor, I cannot say that on-wiki, because that's WP:OUTING. My "community health" is pretty damn poor precisely because we give the same power to every first time anonymous editor as we do to very active editors and we give it effectively to the most persistent and the most unpleasant. BRD is all very well if all involved are seriously trying to get the content right and well-cited. It fails completely when the other party is not engaging with it, being unpleasant, or just returning time and time again to re-do a problematic edit based on "I know this". We have problems with acts of vandalism that get repeated time and time again by a series of different IP addresses. This is impossible to block, we have no solution for it. If you want to see the scale of it, there's series of IP addresses that collectively exhibit similar patterns of thousands of problematic edits in my topic space going back to at least 2013 and were still active in 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup Do we have the power to "whack a mole" the first time we see any of these behaviour YET AGAIN? No, we don't. We have a lot of tedious process of having to find the right admin noticeboard, submit a request with the right templates, provide endless diffs, and then have nothing happen. We make it easy for people to create problems, but extremely difficult to get them stopped and incredibly tedious to clean up after them (you often can't "undo" because of intervening edits etc and these folk can do 100s of edits in a day). Here's one: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Shelati An editor who did a mass change over every suburb of Sydney over a couple days. I suspected them immediately as being a sockpuppet (behaviour was characteristic of "sockpuppet") but unless you can identify the sockmaster, you can't report it. So, instead the changes being made were discussed on the appropriate topic noticeboards, disagreed with, but then the editor was blocked by someone who figured out who the sockmaster was (a sockmaster dating back to 2009). The account was blocked, but the problematic edits have never been cleaned up. Most active contributors who retire do so because of the behaviour of other "contributors" wears them down. In summary, power in Wikipedia is not where you think it is on the curve. It is the power we give to the many people to do the same vandalism, the same "meant well but I'm stupid" edits, the same "I don't know any policies and they don't apply to me anyway" edits, and the sockpuppets and conflict-of-interest editors who carefully hide themselves among them. I wish I had just a little power to exercise in topic spaces where I am knowledgeable and have a long history of positive contribution. I don't want it for baseball players or Icelandic musicians or Pokemon characters, just for Queensland history and geography. That's all I ask. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jan Dittrich Sent: Wednesday, 22 January 2020 8:31 PM To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions: Hello Researchers, Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution which is known as the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me. However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50% of your edits could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a stronger imbalance. I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is problematic when seen from the perspective of community health. I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such imbalances and how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness, documentation… (based on my assumption that a steep curve is less desirable, since the power is more concentrated, the system more fragile and the redistribution of power more constrained) Jan [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) -- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ Research Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0 https://wikimedia.de Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei! https://spenden.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. 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Hi Jan, The question about steepness of the curve across different projects is indeed fascinating! You can find my analysis of inequalities in open source software here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152976 Best, Dj On Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 23:23 Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com<mailto:wiki.pine@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Jan, I think that we may have given you a lot more than you had in mind when you asked your question. I'm aware that you were thinking of "power law" in a way that can be very different than "power dynamics", but I have the latter more on my mind, partially because of recent discussions on Wikimedia-l related to strategy. I remain interested in knowing what the goal of your research is. I'll be busy with non-Wikimedia activities for the next few days, but I'll try to get back to the Wikiverse by this Saturday. If you don't hear back from me after about two weeks then please feel free to email me off list if you'd like me to follow up. In the meantime, Kerry and other capable people may be able to help with any further questions regarding your research interests. Best wishes, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

If anyone was wondering, I was not confusing power law with power dynamics, but Jan's original question talked about community health, redistribution of power and things like training, user friendliness and documentation as strategies, so I assumed power dynamics were in play in the conversation. The power in Wikipedia is held by administrators and other functionaries, the loudest and most persistent (and most willing to canvass openly or off-wiki) in consensus building and, as I have already argued, in the latitude given to the *mass* of very occasional contributors (whether good faith or bad faith) to do bad or low quality edits which others have to deal with. If you redefine power in other ways, such as impact (or influence) on readers (those who we serve), then of course the more active users do have the *potential* for that power provided their contributions are made to creating/expanding content rather than fiddling with existing content (most edits are "fiddling"). An occasional contributor has much more limited power wrt to impacting/influence the reader (probably disproportionately lower that their number of edits would suggest as they are more likely to be reverted). But equally not all very active editors get to shape the reader view. If you look at the activities of the top editors by edit count, they tend to do a lot of very repetitive and arguably more administratively-focused edits with the reorganisation of category system being a major activity. Studies of readers show they don't look much beyond the References and hence aren't looking at the categories so if power is about reader impact/influence, then this group have very little power relative to their number of contributions. If we talk about community health in Wikipedia (specifically English Wikipedia), we all know it's a massive problem and somewhat independent of power (by any definition). It's an abrasive environment with far more criticism than praise/appreciation across the board. Active contributors regularly burn-outand dealing with "the community" is often given as a reason. While there is always one final issue that is the straw that breaks the camel's back, it's rarely just about that issue but a level of frustration that develops over a long time. Good faith newcomers get turned off by bad initial experiences. Unfortunately this group mean well but often make bad edits. I do outreach to new good-faith contributors in my topic space, but it is a WikiProject Australia message delivered by Twinkle (nobody has time to write personal messages to new contributors each day) but I do try to ask them where they got their information from (failure to cite being a big problem with this group) but rarely do they reply or make further edits. Jan mentioned training. I also do outreach which is mostly face-to-face edit training and supporting editathons (generally working with a library or university as the partner organisation) so I do a lot of work with new users in face-to-face situations, but for all my efforts (for which the feedback is always very positive), these new users rarely contribute again after these sessions and this experience is common to most people doing outreach work, leading to the belief that "Wikipedians are born not made". There are efforts already taking place to provide online training or on-boarding systems (currently being trialled in some other language Wikipedias) but, even if shown to be effective, I don't think there is much likelihood of mandating any of such things on English Wikipedia with its strong libertarian ideology and most new users are "on a mission" to make a particular change/addition to an article. I don't think most of them will voluntarily do some kind of training or on-boarding first (people on a mission are not easy to deflect in general). I like to believe training in some forms helps individuals but at that end of the power graph the effort/return on individuals is poor. To work with that mass of folk it must be scalable and that tends to rule out anything personal (like a buddy system). As to user friendliness, there isn't a lot of it on Wikipedia. I recollect someone did a study to see if welcome messages helped improve newcomer retention and found they didn't. Indeed our watchlist/welcome system can easily be perceived by new users as stalking. While a welcome message is intended to be encouraging, it does at the same time send the message "I am watching you" which has been described by some new users who receive welcome messages during my training sessions as "creepy". As someone who sends such messages (via Twinkle, there aren't the hours in the day to welcome new users in a more personal way), some of the responses are "creepy" (clearly they looked at my user account and knew I was a woman and felt it was OK to make some inappropriate remark). There are friendships of course between some users, but you don't come to Wikipedia to make friends (join Facebook). To survive I think you either have to be pretty committed to free knowledge (strong mission alignment) or it rewards in some other way (stroking your ego through edit-count-itis, admin power over others, get to push your POV). As to documentation, well, ours isn't great. It's hard to find and full of jargon and assumes you know wiki text. And people on a mission won't stop to read it anyway. And frankly as much as I don't like it, I believe my time is better spent researching and writing content than fixing the documentation. Wikipedia is a moving target for documentation in any case as the underlying software is in constant evolution as are various tools, templates, and other things contributors use. So I think we don't have a healthy community but whether that's related to the power law graph, I am far less convinced. There are a number of quite deliberate choices made on en.WP that create and perpetuate our problems and the community is highly resistant to experiment with these choices. This suggests to me that there are people who get benefit from the current structures, possibly those who are nicknamed the Unblockables, a name that suggests a power dynamic in play! Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Thursday, 23 January 2020 2:22 PM To: Wiki Research-l &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions: Hi Jan, I think that we may have given you a lot more than you had in mind when you asked your question. I'm aware that you were thinking of "power law" in a way that can be very different than "power dynamics", but I have the latter more on my mind, partially because of recent discussions on Wikimedia-l related to strategy. I remain interested in knowing what the goal of your research is. I'll be busy with non-Wikimedia activities for the next few days, but I'll try to get back to the Wikiverse by this Saturday. If you don't hear back from me after about two weeks then please feel free to email me off list if you'd like me to follow up. In the meantime, Kerry and other capable people may be able to help with any further questions regarding your research interests. Best wishes, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l