Dear all,
As many researchers are currently investigating how the COVID-19
pandemic affected contribution and collaboration on Wikipedia, I thought
I'd share the preprint of our quantitative analysis of editor
contributions during the pandemic, which suggests encouraging findings
for the Wikimedia volunteer community (see abstract below):
"Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility
restrictions"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10090
best,
thorsten
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Authors:
Thorsten Ruprechter, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Tiago Santos, Florian
Lemmerich, Markus Strohmaier, Robert West, Denis Helic
Abstract:
Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever created, is a global initiative
driven by volunteer contributions. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out
and mobility restrictions ensued across the globe, it was unclear
whether Wikipedia volunteers would become less active in the face of the
pandemic, or whether they would rise to meet the increased demand for
high-quality information despite the added stress inflicted by this
crisis. Analyzing 223 million edits contributed from 2018 to 2020 across
twelve Wikipedia language editions, we find that Wikipedia's global
volunteer community responded remarkably to the pandemic, substantially
increasing both productivity and the number of newcomers who joined the
community. For example, contributions to the English Wikipedia increased
by over 20% compared to the expectation derived from pre-pandemic data.
Our work sheds light on the response of a global volunteer population to
the COVID-19 crisis, providing valuable insights into the behavior of
critical online communities under stress.
--
Thorsten Ruprechter
Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science (ISDS)
Graz University of Technology, Austria