PARC Forum: How Wikimedia is Scaling Open-Source Innovation

Yesterday, I attended a pretty interesting PARC Forum where the speakers were three members of the Wikimedia Foundation. For those, that don’t know, Wikipedia is actually part of a larger group of projects (including Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, Wikiversity, etc.) which are all under the umbrella of the Wikimedia foundation, but the talks primarily focused on Wikipedia and how the foundation leverages the community of editors and developers to help build the content and tools that make the site work. PARC will have the video up in a couple days if you want to watch, and you can find the presentation here, but I’m presenting a short brain-dump of some of the interesting tidbits and points here, organized by speaker:

Eugene Eric Kim: Strategy Program Manager

• If you include all of the component sites, Wikimedia is the 5th most accessed web-property in the world.
• 350M regular visitors, $10M in revenue, and only 35 employees.
• 45K active contributors (a term they use to indicate people who make 5 or more edits per month) on English Wikipedia.
• The country with the most visitors is actually Canada (which nobody in the audience guessed).
• Defined the Wikimedia Foundation mission with a Jimmy Wales quote: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.“

Trevor Parscal: Lead Front-End, UX Programs

• Trevor is the guy in charge of “basically everything you see” (wow!)
• Wikimedia research shows that people don’t find the software easy to use (duh), so they have launched the Usability Initiative.
• In fact, when they were testing with users, they had one user who took 20 minutes to figure out how to edit a page (and this wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary).
• Asking people what they wanted in the site proved not-so-successful, but having them try out a new Beta version and observing behavior was really fruitful.
• As of now, 84% of the people who opted into the Wikipedia Beta have stayed (almost 300K) people – (there was no mention of how to find the beta, btw).

Tomasz Finc: Engineering Program Manager

• Fundraising is done annually, between November and January.
• Amount raised: 2006 – $1m, 2007 – $2M, 2008 – $6M, and 2009 – $8.1M
• Most of their fundraising comes from small donations (contrary to usual trend of large donations for these types of efforts)
• Did a lot of A/B style testing to figure out how to optimize contribution – a lot of this is actually shared on the Wikimedia Blog.
• Adding Jimmy Wales’ plea increased the donations a LOT (so much that at first they thought the site was being attacked).
• The iPhone application and mobile gateway are both being developed by the community.
• The OLPC now has a full copy of the English Wikipedia on it.

As you can see, the talks basically focused on three elements: 1) Wikipedia is big and wants to get bigger, 2) Wikipedia is hard to use and wants to get easier, 3) Wikipedia relies a lot on the community. While there wasn’t much that was earth-shattering, each of these elements was pretty interesting – the idea that such a HUGE platform and vast amount of content can be supported by just 35 full-time employees and the contributions of the community is incredible, and speaks to the power that effective community management can bring. As Wikipedia is one of the greatest examples of social software and content production, it was great to get the opportunity to peer under the hood a little bit.

For some more information that may not have made it into this brain-dump, check out my live-tweet of the event here.

No related posts.