Gallery

Our community in 20 graphs

What could be more interesting than ...?

How Wikipedia editors compare demographically to the world's population? What proportion of our editors are women? Who are the people who are harassed or feel unsafe on-Wiki? How many users are dissatisfied with WMF software? What could be more interesting to the Wikipedia community than knowing who is part of our community?

The WMF took a survey during the second half of last year that gathered statistics on these and other questions and published the Community Insights 2021 Report in May. It's probably a very good report, but I just couldn't get all the way through it. Too many words. Too much fine print. Boring!

Let's let the graphs speak for themselves.

Demographics

Feeling unsafe, harassment

Empowerment, belonging, and engagement

Technical support, software

← Previous "Gallery"

Next "Gallery" →

In this issue

29 August 2021

News and notes

In the media

Wikimedians of the year

Gallery

News from Wiki Education

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Thanks for pulling these out! It's a good way to highlight some of the findings and a good way to lead people like me to actually read the report! Ganesha811 (talk) 20:11, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a glossary? Eg what is a tenured contributor? (What is a contributor?) Gog the Mild (talk) 21:11, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I'll just repost the link above to the original report m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report. Once you start in with definitions, you're on the slippery slope to a full 30 page report. I think these graphs give you about 80% of the content without all the pages! Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:53, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - In case anyone else was searching for definitions, without wanting to read the entire report, you get most of it from m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report/Survey Methodology. Survey conducted in 2020; email invitation sent to 26,000 active editors with “email this user” activated; 1800 completed at least half. Newcomer is someone who started editing in 2019 or 2020. Tenured (presumably) means someone from 2018 or earlier. To judge the significance of these results, it would be good to see some “n=” figures on these graphs. 2A02:C7D:A8FE:7600:4435:A3EB:3E41:3C80 (talk) 10:01, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
See also "Recent research" in the June issue with more background about the race and ethnicity results, which are the first of their kind. Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:14, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- It'd be interesting to see a more in depth analysis, along the lines of the Pipeline paper mentioned elsewhere in the June issue, than just comparing to total population numbers. Anomie ⚔ 12:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
73% of contributors feel they have the tools they need? 67% say the software is easy to use? 57% say the WMF prioritizes the software that's needed most? Those aren't great numbers, but they're higher than I'd expect. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 23:05, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure we are missing plenty of potential contributors who give up because they don't feel these things. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:03, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. And among many existing contributors, I think there's sometimes a lack of imagination about how much better things could (and ought) to be. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 22:18, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We should update WP:BIAS to cite some of these more recent figures for its demographic data. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 18:51, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There's no such thing as a "tenured contributor." BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 06:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- Reminds me of the joke about the "tenured grad student". That is, that it's a misspelling of "ten-year". Anomie ⚔ 12:39, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There really isn't anything new to be said now IMO (but then again, even I didn't read the entire thing as I found these graphs a bit boring). We can definitely do better. On a side note, did you guys deliberately use "Among US" in the US editors' race graph? Tube·of·Light 03:02, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It would be interesting to see a similar analysis by income level, social class and education. Perhaps it would inform the outreach efforts. Alaexis_¿question? 06:35, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Some of these graphs seem to be based on small data samples - the one listing ethnicities in the UK is based on responses from 67 people (m:Community Insights/Community Insights 2021 Report/Endnotes). 3% of 67 is about 2, so I don't think we can draw much from the fact that there weren't any black people in that sample. Hut 8.5 18:44, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know why we'd expect major changes from 2019 to 2020, and attribute differences to anything more than random fluctuation. Also, am I reading right that en.wiki feel safer than average and have experienced harassment more than average? It wouldn't really surprise me. — Bilorv (talk) 21:36, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I too have a problem with the use of the undefined word "tenured". If the usage is intended to be comparable to the usage in an academic context, then that is an all or nothing proposition. Either the PhD (or equivalent) has tenure or they don't. Another definition is length of service. Editor A has a tenure of two weeks, editor B has a tenure of four months and editor C has a tenure of eight years. What does that tell us? Is there some sort of time/number of edits threshold? Is editor D who has made 2000 edits over two years, blocked three times, brought to ANI eight times and warned there, most of their article edits reverted, and spending endless time bickering and arguing "tenured"? Is editor E who has made 500 edits in six months, focusing on excellent content contributions, never been blocked or even warned, and is now starting to help at the Teahouse "not tenured"? Shoddy presentation. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 02:32, 11 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What do you think of The Signpost? Share your feedback.

Home

About