Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia and most widely-read reference work. It is a crucial source of information for members of the general public, academics and policy makers. But its content is built and curated entirely by volunteers who write about topics they feel motivated to contribute to. While the pool of occasional contributors is vast (375,000 people made 1-4 edits to the English Wikipedia in January 2020) the base of dedicated contributors who shape Wikipedia’s content is small (5,200 people made over 100 edits in January). For a project with more than 6 million articles, this base of dedicated contributors is tiny.
We examined the growth in the quantity and quality of ecology-related articles on Wikipedia between 2013 and 2020 using the article quality assessment reports produced by the Wikipedia 1.0 project. We contrasted these changes with the coverage of articles about bats over a smaller window of time (2017-2020) after the formation of the Bat Task Force. Ecology articles draw contributions from a wide range of people, while bat articles tend to be written by a smaller group of Wikipedians with a more focused interest (including one of us, ENW).
Results/Conclusions
As of February 2020, WikiProject Ecology curated a set of 1,848 articles (up from 768 in August 2013 and 1,367 in September 2017) while the Bat Task Force curated 1,573 articles (up from 1,330 in September 2017). Most articles in both groups are rated Stub class (the lowest rank in Wikipedia’s quality assessment rank) or Start class (the second lowest). Between 2017 and 2020 these proportions were fairly stable in ecology, going from 28% to 26% Stubs and 42% to 44% Start class articles. Among bat articles, on the other hand, Stubs decreased from 73% to 47% while Start class articles increased from 15% to 33%.
We found that a small focused group of contributors made major improvements to the quality of bat articles on Wikipedia, while a larger, but more diffuse group of contributors to ecology articles had much less of an impact. As the product of volunteer labor, Wikipedia is disproportionately shaped by the most engaged volunteers. Given the impact that Wikipedia articles have on the understanding of the field at all levels, ecology desperately needs to expand the pool of contributors willing to engage on a sustained basis.