After increasing rapidly over seven years, the number of active
contributors to English Wikipedia peaked in 2007 and has been in decline
since. A body of evidence will be presented that suggests English
Wikipedia’s pattern of growth and decline appears to be a general
feature of “peer production”—the model of collaborative production that
has produced millions of wikis, free/open source software projects,
websites like OpenStreetMap, and more.
It will be argued that this pattern of growth, maturity, and decline
is not caused by newcomers who have stopped showing up, but rather
because communities have become less open to the newcomers who do
arrive. A theoretical model and a range of empirical evidence will be
provided that suggests why this surprising dynamic may be a rational
approach to the shifting governance challenges faced by digital
knowledge commons.
Bio:
Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both
roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online
communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer
production of digital public goods—like Wikipedia and Linux. He is an
associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University
of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science
Collective. He is a visiting fellow at CITP. He is also a faculty
associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer,
contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free
culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian,
Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects.
